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Comment by wuliwong | Hacker News Reader

I don't think I've ever used HipChat. What don't you guys like about it?

I worked at a place where employees lobbied for Slack endlessly until we got rid of HipChat because -- and I am being completely serious here -- you can't upload as many custom smilies in HipChat.

That was one concern we had where I work, but Slack does many things better—not just unlimited custom emoji.

On the other hand you have to manually resize things for Slack, whereas Hipchat would autoscale and let you crop too. So annoying.~

It's pretty terrible at handling any kind of networking failure (or whatever else causes it to have trouble getting a message delivered). Sometimes the UI will make something appear to have been sent, and quite some time later it gets marked as unsent. There's no explicit option to quit trying, or retry. Sometimes that message eventually disappears, and sometimes the recipient will then receive numerous identical copies of the message without me taking any action. This seems to be typical among users at other companies I talk to as well. This also seems to happen a lot more than I would expect, given that Internet connections are pretty reliable these days.

On the basic level, it doesn’t have as many integrations as slack. It’s mostly important for obscure services, as they often won’t be integrating thousands of chat apps, so they’ll choose Slack.

On the day to day level, it crashes even more than Slack, and syncs badly.

The pettiest and weirdest part is it doesn’t signal edited messages. The editing window is super short, but it still feels like being moonlighted when you read something and 2 secs later it’s a different thing.

Gaslighted. Moonlighting is a different thing.

HipChat (At least for me on Windows) absolutely messes up any SQL I try to send to someone. It's unusable because HipChat apparently adds characters to the beginning of each line. At this point I just email the SQL, but I really shouldn't have to for quick and dirty queries.

In addition to many general software issues (it crashes a decent amount), it's not particularly easy to send images or documents over it (where as with slack I can take a screen shot of a dashboard and post exactly what I am referring too).

> What don't you guys like about it?

You cannot edit comments in Hipchat. I can talk about other issues as well but not editing comments is a deal breaker for me.

Sure you can, though I stumbled on it. Type s/sub/repl and it edits.

HipChat works with Pidgin, which doesn't support edits, I imagine you'll see something similar as with the Discord edit feature when you're connected via Pidgin (you get a new message, prefixed with EDIT:).

Nah, it just shows the regex as typed. So not much of a different experience from traditional irc!

Sync. I have three computers and an iPhone. If I check a message on one device, it still shows unread on the other devices. It's total crap.

That’s the best case.

It often fails to notify of new direct messages, I suspect thinking one device was active when it was received.

I actually raised a ticket for this.

There was a long thread I didn't follow at all about how that was how it was supposed work.

That's when I switched to Slack.

To be fair Slack doesn't do this and other network related things much better (in my experience). For each complaint here about HipChat I experience the same failings in Slack, just less often. But Slack is a bit better, so people make the argument that it adds up. (We moved from HipChat to Slack several month sago, I didn't find it much of a game changer apart from getting the company to pay Slack to store history and make it searchable but I'm someone who would be content with IRC and searching local logs.)

The client freezes and crashes frequently, and messages routinely fail to deliver, with less than 20,000 people in an organization.

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