back to article Yakety-yak app HipChat whacked in Slack chat chaps' tech snatch pact

Oz enterprise software biz Atlassian is discontinuing its chat apps Stride and Hipchat – and handing the tech blueprints over to Slack. If you're using those two Atlassian messaging platform then you'll need to migrate away to some other service as the plug is being pulled. “We have always had a spirited yet friendly …

  1. Steve Button Silver badge

    (foreveralone) ?

    (aww) But but, what about the emoticons on HipChat? (sadpanda)

    Slack is just not the same. (dealwithit)

    (motherofgod) (mindblown)

    (whynotboth)?

  2. ninjaturtle

    Meanwhile, IRC is still working, and still doesn't cost a cent.

    Granted, no custom emoticons, but that will soon be the case for Hipchat as well..

    1. phuzz Silver badge

      Or there's a variety of XMPP based systems, which are slightly better suited to inter-office messaging imo.

      Both IRC and XMPP have a range of server systems, and clients for pretty much every platform, and both are open standards so they're easy to extend.

      What more does Slack/HipChat/etc. offer that they don't?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        "What more does Slack/HipChat/etc. offer that they don't?"

        Pay money, get chat*. Simple as that, no mucking about.

        *And also audit, retention, disposal, search, identity integration, support and baked-in integrations with practically every other enterprise tool on the planet.

        1. stephanh
          Headmaster

          "baled-in integrations with practically every other enterprise tool on the planet."

          Mmm, baled-in? Let's see https://www.dictionary.com/browse/baled

          1. noun:a large bundle or package prepared for shipping, storage, or sale, especially one tightly compressed and secured by wires, hoops, cords, or the like, and sometimes having a wrapping or covering: a bale of cotton; a bale of hay.

          2. a group of turtles.

          3. verb (used with object), baled, bal·ing. to make or form into bales: "to bale wastepaper for disposal."

          OK, so afterwards you end up with a big bale of enterprise tools, all tightly compressed and secured by wires, hoops, cords, or the like. Sounds about right.

        2. devjoe

          We migrated from IRC to hipchat a few years ago and I might be able to offer a little insight on that.

          As someone who writes a lot, I used the built-in IRC client in emacs which works very well on any OS. But we had several non-developers who needed an IRC client and obviously had no desire to learn emacs. In short; we could not find an IRC client for windows that didn't suck. This alone was the primary driver to drop IRC and move to hipchat.

          In hipchat, everyone gets the same client and it does what it does. Coming from an IRC client in a real text editor, the hipchat client is appalling - it has only the absolutely most basic text editing functionality (adding and removing single characters basically - forget about cursor movement, word skipping, in-line searching, transposition etc.). But to users who are not used to typing much, hipchat does everything they need to - it completely matches the editing capabilities of "notepad" and for a great many users this is good enough.

          What hipchat then added was images. This actually comes in handy for exchanging screenshots - and yes you can do file transfers with IRC but in hipchat it's one of the primary features. It's image exchange support far exceeds its text exchange support in my opinion :)

          As for searching, hipchat does claim to have it but the matching is so unbelievably weak that I gave up using it completely. With regards to search, I was way better off with IRC and emacs - but that's not because of IRC that's because of the editor.

          Hipchat stores conversations and lets you retrieve them when you come back after having been off line. With IRC, you need to be on-line to see what's going on. Personally, I actually felt that IRC had an advantage here - because if I want persistent messages I'll use e-mail (it's just as instant as chat but does not require the counterpart to be on-line). So when we used IRC, I'd still use mail for internal communication at times. Different tools for different types of communication. Now, with hipchat, I have almost completely stopped using e-mail internally in our organisation. I probably send one or two e-mails a week, down from maybe 20-50 a day. In that sense, hipchat has been just as much an e-mail replacement as an IRC replacement. I'm not convinced that this is a good thing, but this is what happened.

          We did consider writing/finding a bot for IRC which would store conversations in all rooms and make them searchable so that you could both see past discussions where you had been offline, and also offer better search. IRC is of course completely open to that, but we didn't find a bot we could just use off the shelf.

          As for the pre-built integrations... Well, we used one of the integrations (the jira one) for a while and then it stopped working. The hipchat product is a very very complex piece of machinery implementation wise - I suspect it started life as a proof of concept and then never really got to the "ok let's write it from scatch, properly" stage. Troubleshooting anything, in my limited experience with hipchat, is hopeless. If a reboot doesn't fix your problem, a re-install may - and that's basically what you have to work with.

          So, in conclusion: Moving to hipchat from IRC definitely changed things - not sure it was for the better. Where do we go from here? I'm really not sure, but I think we know more about our needs now than we did when we moved to hipchat :)

  3. Joe Dietz

    Surely I'm not the only one to have noticed just how really terrible slack is? For all the hype I did expect something a bit more than IRC wrapped in web-wobble. I'm not sure I'll mourn hip-chat either, since it seems to have been just as unimaginative.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      The one reason to use HipChat was the Jira and confluence integration then they forced us to stride which was Skype but about as broken. But slack is also terrible. Not sure where we will look next. I certainly enjoy having three or four memory leaking clients openon my desktop at all times.

  4. Registered Register Registrant

    That title

    Deserves an award. Abnoxious af. +1

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