So as long as I personify a piece of software, it too can become the subject of worthless press articles?
Brings back my days on IRC.
I read an article about Slack that praised their speed of integrating feedback and iterating with the following example: "the Slack team quickly identified small changes that had a big impact: Within the list of channels, they added fields for a description and the number of people using that channel."
Not that I totally disagree, but, signing up for Slack is easier than using NickServ for the average person. There's a bunch of features that make HipChat, Slack, Hall et al easier to use than IRC, especially for someone who doesn't want to learn anything new.
Just worth thinking about...
http://pgarbe.github.io/blog/2015/03/24/how-to-run-hubot-in-...
There are a couple articles/repos out there with detailed steps on running Hubot on AWS. While the ease and simplicity of deploying Hubot outside of Heroku is not a tenth as easy, there are a couple of options out there.