How to clear proxy settings for Atlassian HipChat on Windows

For some bizarre reason, Atlassian has decided to put the network connection settings for HipChat AFTER the login screen. So say for example you are a business user with a laptop, and you’ve configured HipChat to work on your corporate network with a proxy, then you leave the building or go home and use a normal Internet connection – HipChat stops working and you have no way within the UI to fix it. You will just receive an error message stating “It looks like you’re not connected to the Internet. Check your network connection. Connecting in 5,4,3,2,1” ironically you can’t check your network connection as it’s blocked behind the login screen.

So the only way around it is to go hack the configuration file:

1. Locate the file
   Windows
   C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\Atlassian\Hipchat.ini
   
   Linux
   /home/<user>/.config/Atlassian/Hipchat.ini
2. Open the file
3. Note for next step: if you plan on swapping between work and home networks take a backup of the settings before you clear them. Save these in a separate file somewhere safe and you can copy paste them back in later if you need to reverse the changes.
4. Clear all of the settings fields associated with the proxy so they appear like the example below

   proxyType=
   httpHostname=
   httpUserName=
   httpPassword=
   httpPort=

5. Save the changes
6. Restart HipChat and you will now be able to login. Unfortunately, you will have to do this every time you want to use HipChat outside your corporate network. And visa versa you will need to add the proxy back again if you want to use it on your work network (or use it with a proxy).

Hopefully, Atlassian fixes this. It’s a terrible user experience as implemented currently and departs from the conventions used by most windows apps.