Does it work with sidebar?

the 2.0.2 update will have a widget that will work better in the sidebar (right now it looks weird in it).

babble is working fine for me atm, what browser you in?

Chrome on Windows

i've restarted the node, not sure why you are getting this message.

OK weird, can't do it via my laptop but can via my iPhone. I wonder if it's a work firewall thing blocking it from working

that is a good possibility, it is running on port 3000, not port 80 or 443 like most web servers run on.

Aaaah yes, that would be it.

Lasa question, how does this differ from say Chatbox?

ChatBox uses a interval polling script to retrieve messages. each user connected will connect to the server every x amount of seconds, a database query will be run to see if there have been any new replies, processes the results and then returns them to user. each user using it, this process will be done for. this can be very resource intensive, the more users, the more resources used. this can cause your server to be come slow or even crash it. even if you had a beefy server, there are only only so many connections a server can handle before all available connections are used (in apache the number of http connections is relatively low, and can be lower due to security setups, same in nginix).

Babble uses websockets, and node.js as way to "emit" new messages to the connect clients. when you go to babble, The connection to node.js gets upgraded to a websocket (these are virtually limitless, and the servers handle them a lot better than http connections, as they don't have the overhead to deal with on a http server). Once the connection is upgrade, event listeners wait for new messages to be sent to them. Connections to the server are reduced, and the querying of your database is greatly reduced, same with processing of the message, as this only happens once, when a user sends a message. There is some post processing that happens, but that happens on the user side, and doesn't effect the performance of your server. 

as for differences in features or abilities, I'm not that familiar with chatbox and it wasn't my target for competition. I made babble feature parity with IPS chat, and then expanded from there. like with rooms and "commands".