We wrote ourselves a logging bot. It was nice for a while, until people started reading scrollback and picking up conversations about themselves that weren't always pretty. Sometimes you need to vent, other times you just want to talk candidly.

The consensus was that IRC should be approached like a conference room. If you're there, you can listen. If you're not, you don't get to bug the room. Wasn't the optimal solution (the scrollback and link capture was extremely useful at times), but that's the way it went.