[richo]

IRC is great because of the simplicity of bolting things to it.

We do all of our CI notifications and deployments with a bot in a builds channel.

With that said, Grove is going away and it doesn't look like there's a polished hosted alternative, so we're torn between setting up and managing our own internal system (which dollars per month will cost us more, once you put a dollar value on ops time) and trying to find something which will do what we want.