It would be cool to be able to differentiate between private and public messages. Created and closed tickets could go public, but say changing priority and commenting on tickets would be sent as privmsg..

haha, I just wrote up this crazy thing... morale of that story -- hipchat information is here http://help.hipchat.com/knowledgebase/articles/64359-running-a-hipchat-bot -- and if you go here first -- https://www.hipchat.com/docs/api you might get the wrong idea about what is possible!

yeah their API support is a little wonky. the solution we've been using (not for phabricator but for pagerduty and alerts and other stuff) is to curl their HTTP api to get messages into chat rooms. you can't get messages out like that, or private messages iirc, but it's a start (if you never need users to talk back to you, at least)

I changed this ticket from being HipChat specific to being Jabber specific. Since HipChat uses Jabber for its chat protocol, i would argue that focusing our efforts on XMPP would be a much better use of our time, since most proprietary chat systems have XMPP connectors, not to mention the massive amounts of people who use Jabber systems directly.

TL;DR: XMPP is arguably the second most widely used protocol behind IRC, and it should be the focus of our development effort for phabot for the future.