Tue, 17 Mar 2015 13:37:00 +0000

BitlBee 3.4 is available for download now. It's a big release, with 123 commits from 11 contributors. Full changelog. Highlights:

Twitter Filter channels - Search by keyword/hashtag or a list of users. See the wiki page for more details!

Twitter: Add rawreply command, like reply but bitlbee won't add @mention. Also add favorite / fav command aliases.

Twitter: Avoid showing duplicate tweets on reconnect

Jabber: Fixed crashes with file transfers (they still fail at bypassing NATs, but at least they fail without crashing)

Purple: Improved support for gadugadu, whatsapp and telegram.

Add a 'pattern' parameter to the blist command, to filter it.

The utf8_nicks setting should be more reliable now.

And many more!

Important: Recompiling third party plugins such as bitlbee-steam or bitlbee-facebook is required after you install this new version!

And on that topic, a brief note about dying protocols:

Facebook: May die on 2015-04-30. jgeboski made bitlbee-facebook in response to this. It connects through MQTT, and also supports group chats. It's not 100% stable yet, but it's usable.

Google talk: Not dying. It mostly works, just no groupchats. Consider using hangups if you need those.

MSN: Dead in this release. Two years after they announced it would shut down, microsoft actually retired MSNP18. See also ismsndeadyet.com. There's a work in progress branch (soon to be merged into develop) that fixes it by using MSNP21 instead.

Also, the main development repository moved to github, because all the cool kids use git now. (well, actually because dx took over as a core developer)

The BZR repo is still getting synced for convenience purposes

The nightly APT repo still works

The bug tracker and wiki will not be migrated to github

However, pull requests are preferred to patches