A number of people have been notifying me about the inability for them to connect to the IRC chat. Specifically, this has been an error message more or less like "Bad username". After some investigation, I found out why this happens and have deployed a fix.

If you're not interested in details, you can happily try to connect to the IRC again, and hopefully you'll have no trouble. Let me know if you do though.
Still here for details? Ok.

IRC is a pretty old protocol, and requires a number of different fields when you connect to it. Beyond the obvious (nickname), it also requires a "username" and a "real name" in its authentication message.

Now, in modern times, these two are practically meaningless, but they are used in things like IRC server bans and the like. With Mibbit, the username is set to the originating user's IP number (in hexadecimal form). So far so good.

However, IRCU (the server I run for FUMBBL) runs a number of tests on the username for legacy reasons. Basically, old bots and scripts used the username field to fake other people and/or generated random usernames. So, in order to limit this, the people at IRCU chose to try to detect these autogenerated usernames and restrict these users to connect.

With Mibbit generating more or less random alphanumeric strings, this triggered the IRCU verification system and thus the "Bad Username" appeared, and the connection was refused.

My initial thought was to go into a config file and simply disable this username verification system. No such luck though. No setting for that in the template configuration file.. Next step: Find documentation. No luck there either. Ok, download the source code and check what triggers this test and see if it's connected to a configuration setting. Nope.

So what I ended up doing was to make a small patch to the code that simply disables this username verification code and compile the IRC server. This has now been completed and I've restarted the IRC server (which obviously caused people to get disconnected for a short period of time). Ended up having to restart a couple of times to resolve random issues (file locks for .PID files etc etc, nothing major) but now it appears to be working again. Mibbit connections are accepted without the Bad username error and you guys should have an easier time connecting.