[baddox]

Slack seems to have mostly eclipsed Hipchat, at least among Silicon Valley startups, but integrations probably weren't a huge factor in that. Slack does have a nicer flow for integrations, but Hipchat worked quite well (and actually had much-missed features like customizing the background color of messages; it's unfathomable how Slack could still not have this feature).

[Klathmon]

>it's unfathomable how Slack could still not have this feature

I hear this saying a lot, and every time I just can't take it seriously.

This is the first time I've ever heard of someone wanting customizable background colors for messages on a messaging platform. It's just not something I or anyone I know about cares about.

I just can't see how that would be considered a high importance feature by anyone.

[baddox]

It's all about integrations. We have all sorts of server messages and errors in a couple of our Slack engineering channels. Slack provides almost no way to visually distinguish these messages based on importance. In Hipchat, we had red/yellow/green background colors that worked great.

To be clear, I'm not dead set on having background colors. I just really miss having a good visual distinction between messages.

[Klathmon]

I came on a little strong there, it's just saying things like "how could they not have [insert niche feature here]?" drives me up a damn wall!

But that makes sense, and it would be a nice to have. In the meantime can you "hack it in" via different icons per status?

[baddox]

We do it with icons. It's still nowhere near as immediately recognizable at a glance, but I suppose it's fine. I just had a thought: you could embed an image preview that's just a solid red square. That would be very noticeable for important errors.

[kcorbitt]

HipChat's colored messages made it easy to see the error messages in a stream of mostly unimportant notifications. Slack kinda lets you do the same thing with a vertical colored bar to the left of the message, but important/error messages are much less visually distinct.

[Jordrok]

I seem to remember AIM allowing customized fonts and background colors around 15 years ago... Just sayin'

[Klathmon]

And a Porsche from 1992 can outrun a current day Prius, it doesn't make one better than the other...

[criddell]

Depends on how long the race is :)

[pavel_lishin]

And it was a miserable nightmare trying to talk to my friend who would decide to use bright yellow Comic Sans on a bright pink background.

[lmm]

AIM is actually really nice these days. I wish I could get my friends to switch back to it.

[JonnieCache]

mIRC supported ANSI colour codes for foreground and background back in the 90s. I seem to remember people hated you for using them though.

[douche]

People go ape-shit about silly features in IM clients all the time. Case in point, emoticons

[daveguy]

Back when I was a boy we didn't have any fancy emoticons! We used ascii characters and we LIKED it! >:-O

[derFunk]

Hipchat, like ALL other Atlassian products are always feeling just incomplete. By design. (I'm using 80% of their product line).

Slack just feels complete. For tech and non-tech teams.