Another day, another IRC client — Making web panel Mibbit "Better"

[hebgbs]

And I say that in quotes, because Mibbit looks horrible.

So for the better part of this week I have been working on IRCCloud. It's a great IRC client, but to use more than two IRC servers at once (aside from IRCCloud's own server) you need to spend a little bit of money. If you'd rather not do that, then there is a free alternative: Mibbit.

But let me tell you what; it ain't pretty. Worse yet it won't remember your last servers, channels therein those servers, and some servers outright ban Mibbit, leading to immediate G-lines for what seem like absolutely no reason aside from service abuse. If you can join desired servers with it and don't need the luxuries that IRCCloud provides then it will satisfy the vast majority of more important needs. So here's what you should do, to make Mibbit not terrible in a web panel;

1. Visit https://chat.mibbit.com
2. Register for an account. Yes, you need to register in order to access preferences. But it's totally worth it because you'll need to change some things.
3. Verify, then visit preferences by clicking the link in the site header labelled Prefs.
4. Navigate to preference tab Chat Output
5. Disable the following: Time column, Nick column
6. Optional: Go to preference tab General and enable Tabs on left.
   There's something else to be done if you choose to do this.

That's the basics we can do in Mibbit right now, but we can do better. With Stylus (or alternatively, TamperMonkey) we can perform the following:

6. Install this style to remove the header since you don't need it anymore, and it's a massive waste of space.
   Alternatively, install with TamperMonkey
7. Install this style if you've specified to use tabs on left; It's great if you're in a lot of places at once.
   Alternatively, install with TamperMonkey

Once you've finished, you can then add https://chat.mibbit.com in your sidebar and it'll look... alright. There is still more work to be done if I want to make Mibbit 100% not bad to use, but for the time being this is the effort I've put into it so far. It's a terribly-coded website made with awful coding practices, but it does the job if you need to populate a lot or IRC servers and they all don't hate Mibbit.