Leaving chat on window close - is it a feature?

[Greg Hudson]

On Wed, 2007-06-13 at 23:47 +0400, Alexander Rokashevich wrote:
> When I close a channel tab on IRC/Jabber - I leave this channel at once.
> Don't you think it would be more convenient not to leave it, just
> minimize to "buddy" and continue logging conversations there?

I don't think this is a bug, but I would certainly be interested in a
way to control that behavior.  In MIT's homegrown chat system (Zephyr),
power users often subscribe to hundreds of chat channels--I appear to be
in almost 300 myself--most of which almost never get traffic.  One of
the obstacles to switching people over to Jabber is the unsuitability of
most Jabber clients (including Pidgin) to that kind of mentality.
There's no way to be subscribed to a chat channel without having a
conversation tab allocated to it, and more than 10 or so tabs becomes
unwieldy.