[UUMMUU]

We recently switched from Hipchat to Slack and at first I hated it, now I'm only mildly disgruntled because I did a few modifications:

1. Bubble when I get a direct message. 2. Leave all but about 3-4 groups. 3. Tell images to not default display (have to click on them) 4. Star important channels (The star is next to the #channelname at the top and it's only visible when hovered) That big star on the top right is not to star a channel.

5. and probably most importantly was to switch to the compressed mode so all the chat spaces are as tightly compacted as possible.

[ssmoot]

We switched from Hipchat (buggy in the beginning, smooth and ideal at the end) to Hall (a buggy, slow, awful mess) to Slack (also slow, but not buggy, and awful UX).

Hipchat gets notifications right. Slack and Hall seem to have (in)sane defaults, and not quite right customizations.

The web-view of Slack is slow and stupid.

It's picky, but I loved the vim/sed style substitutions in Hipchat. Slack FTL.

But the biggest annoyance by far: In Hipchat you could reorder your chats however you felt like. In Slack they're fixed. And team chats are arbitrarily (feeling) broken up into groups and channels. Which is a completely useless distinction for most I think.

Hipchat had @all and @here. Which seem pretty self explanatory. Slack has @group, @channel, and... I guess that's it. No version of @here AFAICT, and depending on what sort of "room" you're in, the @all equivalent changes.

The iOS app also makes something that looks like a room picker and instead makes it some other menu I forget. And notifications will happily occur on my laptop, computer, iPhone and iPad all at once if I don't catch it at my desk in time. Here's a hint: If you decide to notify my phone, don't notify anything else at that point. No cat picture or CI build notification deserves Def-Con 5 treatment.

But it has themes? And useless giphy integrations? Honestly I don't get the love at all. Form over function at it's worst. I really dislike it. :-p

[nemothekid]

Maybe our settings are set correctly, but HipChat's notifications seem half baked. I've been trying out Slack on another org, and I noticed the biggest issue in the way we use Slack is that most of our communication is person to person.

This seems to come about because any HipChat message to a room you are in notifies & alerts the whole room on OS X. Because of this, most communication happens in private person to person rooms which defeats the purpose of having public rooms for transparency. I haven't been able to get any of the rooms feature to stick and so what commonly happens is two people discuss things on chat, then repeat those conversations to everyone who should have been on it in meatspace.

All of this because HipChat still doesn't let you set per-room notifications.

[ssmoot]

I'm 99% sure that's not the default and you've turned on some option to notify everything.

Otherwise there'd be no point of @all and @here if you were going to be notified anyways.

[suvelx]

I had my admin enable the IRC gateway and I just use that now. Uploaded files are a little awkward (but that's mostly because I have to switch between multiple google enterprise accounts during the course of a day).

Put the 'SLACK' user on ignore and most of the annoying integrations disappear.

That said, I still hate the thing.

[zobzu]

cloudirc seem like a decent middle ground when tech ppl can use/setup irc incl. bots and integration s while others just use the web/mobile ui from irccloud.

also this way you own the data/service for the most part.