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Comment by freerobby | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. We tried Slack on our 26-person team and left it after a week. It had a few fans, but most people found the interface to be more complex and noisy than HipChat. Lots of red icons and blue banners that could not be disabled. No ability to see at a glance who is in a room without clicking the list and scrolling through it. The integrations were nice and the search was amazing, but those things were less important to us than the frictionless communication tools, which HipChat has nailed. Additionally, Slack lacks a distinction between @all and @here, which is frustrating when you want to announce something in a room without emailing everyone present.

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Slack's blue "unread messages" banner should be a deal-breaker. I feel like I spend 10% of my day clicking around on Slack trying to get all the channels to realize I have read all their messages. It's such an insane usability nightmare that I can't believe any person or team seriously building a chat app would implement it.

I asked Slack and they told me how to fix it:

Escape closes the blue banner for the current channel.

Shift-Escape closes that blue banner for all channels.

Yeah, that was their response to my ticket as well. Shift-Escape saves some time, but it's still a useless feature that provides nothing but annoyance.

Similar story. I really liked Slack and the integrations are fantastic, but the UI has way too much going on and the lack of a native Windos client meant even just deploying the app is a hassle. The mobile client has menus that slide from left, right, and top last I checked. I told them they'd have had my business easily if they had a one click windows install and an optional Dummy Mode I could turn on for users by default that makes it work like a simple irc client.

I went to HipChat instead but it's got its own problems. Weirdly you can choose to get notifications for all rooms you're in or none of them, but nothing in between. Very frustrating.

You can connect to Slack through any IRC client, check your settings.

My goal is to make make setup and support easy for my users, some of whom are remote and most of whom have never heard of IRC. I don't literally want to deploy a bunch of mIRC clients.

(That said, if I did it over again I might pick Slack over HipChat. The integrations with e.g. Github really are that much better.)

We just made the switch and I'm in agreement-- too noisy to be a serious tool.

But there is an all/here distinction-- just named everyone/channel.

everyone/channel is similar but not the same.

In HipChat, you can be in a room but you won't get notifications if people mention "@here" while you're idle. With Slack, this isn't possible; you would get email notifications for all of the rooms you're in every time "@channel" is mentioned. Furthermore, "@everyone" can only be used in the primary chat room, not others.

I wrote this:

https://github.com/cjbarber/hipchat-alternatives/

I while back.

This move by HipChat makes me happy.

I've attempted to move over, but HipChat is far superior for my needs.

You could add: https://jabbr.net , it's opensource, so people could customize it (it's on the .Net platform)

I think there is @everyone and @channel.

It's not the same. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7807003

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