Atlassian abandoned HipChat's bug tracker, and put up a fresh JIRA that they discourage you from using at several steps. That's one way to get the bug count down without fixing any bugs.
I still remember, and have nightmares about, the day ~300 users lost all private chats, private room membership, and chat history, all because of braindead design.
Hipchat is not my favorite atlassian product. The only reason they have any traction whatsoever is because Slack doesn't offer a behind the firewall product.
Why can't HipChat message editing be as easy as Skype's? If HipChat is at all targeted for devs, why is pasting/sharing code a pita? Where is bold/italics on linux? Your own hyperlinks (instead of pasting raw urls?
I only use HipChat because the alternatives at my company are worse. Even IRC seems better at this point.
No doubt they'll sell someday though so w/e. Temporary / replaceable is the new norm for productivity tools. Beware lock-in! Might end up back on IRC next.
The editing function is embarrassingly bad. I get it, I've been on IRC when Perl was cool, but I can't believe they're shipping that. I don't think I've seen a non-programmer use it, ever.
I've also never felt so unwelcome in a bug reporter as in HipChat's. It really reminded me that Atlassian sells to suits, not to users.
I guess one way to explain it is that Hipchat feels like an enterprise product, and Slack feels like a consumer product. The difference being that enterprise products get used because some high-level person says, "Lo, all my vassals shall now use Hipchat." Which means that user experience is secondary. Whereas consumer software has to earn each user, meaning that it works harder to please and support those users.
JIRA's BDUF approach to ticketing/bug tracking pleases middle managers whose job is to spend all day clicking around arcane interfaces and finding a way to generate a report that shows their team is highly productive, but it's painful for actual doers to get in there and move stuff around, which means it rarely gets done, which means that the tracking is not very reliable, which means that the value of the bug tracker is dubious. The most important feature any bug tracker can have is that it's low-friction enough that most people will actually use it.
JIRA has tried various things to make this less onerous, including GreenHopper/swimlanes, an attempt to remake JIRA into a Trello-like drag-and-drop interface, but it just never seems to click the same way. For example, today, when I tried to move a ticket in JIRA from the "New" swimlane to the "Done" swimlane, I got a "WORKFLOW EXCEPTION".
