This morning the jabber.org admin team installed a new build of M-Link provided by Isode. This build addresses the major issues we’ve had over the last month or so.

First, communication between Google Talk and jabber.org appears to be fixed. We can’t promise that you’ll never experience any difficulties chatting with your Google Talk friends, but the previous problem (lagged and in some cases lost messages) has been solved.

Second, the old legacy SSL port 5223 is working again, enabling you to connect using most older clients (e.g., iChat on Tiger) as well as various “crippled” clients that still don’t support STARTTLS on port 5222 (e.g., mobile clients like QIP and SIM). We will continue to encourage developers of those clients to add STARTTLS support and we reserve the right to turn off port 5223 at some point in the future, but we probably won’t do so until platforms like OS X Tiger and KDE 3 have been end-of-lifed.

Several smaller issues have yet to be fixed (e.g., chatroom logs and persistent storage of changes to personal vCards and chatroom configurations), but we will be working with the Isode team on those fixes in the coming weeks. We are also aware that we still need to get web registration working again. If you really need a new jabber.org account instead of an account at one of the many other open XMPP services, please use the contact information provided on the Get Help page for assistance and we’ll try to take care of your request as soon as possible.

This is just a quick note to let jabber.org users know that the folks at Isode have been working on fixes to a number of the open issues we mentioned in our last update, including our communication problems with Google Talk. Testing is underway and we hope to be installing updated software this week.