As we're approaching 5,000 public chat rooms on Gitter [https://gitter.im], we thought we'd take a look at some of our more popular rooms and communities and bring you a few tips and best practices on how other people are using Gitter effectively. Different audiences, different rooms The guys over at Marionette.js [http://marionettejs.com/] have been using Gitter for some time now. They use two different chat rooms…

Today, we introduced a major feature to Gitter [https://gitter.im] called Channels. These are rooms about anything and don't have to map directly to something in GitHub. Want a devops room? A design room? A watercooler? A London office room? Want an invite-only room with a few people in it? Channels are your friend. If you reload Gitter, you'll notice a new button at the bottom left of the screen titled…

We've just launched the ability to drag and drop files into any chat room. During our Beta period, the file size is limited to 5MB. Once we've ironed out any teething issues, we'll look to increase that. How it works Quite simply, drag a file into any chat room, you'll notice a progress bar above the chat input area as the file uploads and processes. We'll…

TL;DR Version Gitter is now available on 6667 [https://irc.gitter.im]. Verbose We love chat. As individuals, we've been using it in various forms since the 90's. Yet something didn't feel right. Sure you can hack together various bots and scripts to get a richer experience. Or someone else can build that for you and you can spend that time making other awesome things. So we built Gitter…

Great news. The API team at GitHub have been busy over the last few weeks and have released a whole series of new, more granular oAuth scopes. What this means is that we don't need to ask for write access to your profile in order to use Gitter. Huzah! For new users, just head on over to Gitter [https://gitter.im] and once you click signup you'll see the new oAuth permission…