"Shaving the Yak" is great. However I often think of the MITM video when in these situations; and personally refer to it as "Hal's Tangent" which has a kind of philosophical/mathematics feel to it.
Although a sausage factory would be bad, at least each tour would be standard, and at least visiting that sausage factory wouldn't compromise your security and your liberty and finally when you get home with your free tour sausages, at least they'd interact with your saucepan the same way all the other sausages do.
Get an IRC client that supports plug-ins and scripts and create your own tools. I use IRSSI and there are loads of scripts available to use as a starting point.
IRSSI doesn't allow basic needs for a team (not only developpers).
It needs persistence and a web based client.
I don't think it would be very challenging doing a open sourced service like this but I don't understand why anyone hasn't done it.
Use them all? Try them out and decide for yourself? I think you'll find we are in the lucky position where we have lots of options. Each option can be a viable solution, most stuff comes down to personal knoledge, experience and preference.
