It is with great pleasure that I can now announce that kiwiirc.com and its development is now sponsored by Private Internet Access.

Some people may recognise the company as they have been sponsoring and helping out the IRC community for many years, such as the Freenode network. Having already shown their interest in pushing IRC forward and making sure that core IRC projects can stay afloat, it is a well suited match as a sponsor to the Kiwi IRC project as this can benefit every IRC network and community that uses the Kiwi IRC web client.

So what does this mean for the project?

There are no large changes being made. Kiwiirc.com and the open source project are still independent and run by volunteers. However, with the extra support, this allows me to be focusing on Kiwi IRC development much more closely and building up kiwiirc.com with new features and improvements at a faster pace.

It’s not just development that’s involved in this project. Serving kiwiirc.com for an instant, always available web IRC client for any network out there has been the larger bulk of the project and has exploded in recent years, growing from hundreds to millions of users every month. This has been a personal financial drain for some time (handling IRC isn’t cheap!) since I have never wanted to start showing adverts, but we can now easily expand to be supporting the new growth and continue supporting every IRC network out there with a simple, modern IRC client for the web and mobile.

What's happening next?

There has been a lot of silence with progress in recent months due to the lack of time available towards this project, however with that changing now we can start to pick up the pace of development some more.

Some highlights of whats currently happening:

An entire re-write has been in the works with a development preview available here

Amazing mobile and tablet device support

The open source project and related projects has now moved into it’s own organisation, https://github.com/kiwiirc

There has been some heavily requested features over time which I can now start putting resources into. I know some of these will be getting people excited so there will be another mention of these once the new release of Kiwi IRC has become generally available.

More information on these will appear in the near future so be sure to be following @kiwiirc on twitter or the mailing list to be getting the updates as they happen! Or just come say hey on irc.freenode.net/#kiwiirc :)

Finally, a big thanks to the new sponsor, PrivateInternetAccess, for helping not only Kiwi IRC but the IRC community as a whole. If you’re looking around for a VPN provider to keep yourself protected online, take a look at privateinternetaccess.com as they come highly recommended from many different sources and reviews!