141–150 of 536 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But if your entire infrastructure is centrally managed and can disappear at a company's whim, you're setting your community up for problems.
This is certainly true for github as well.
But that said, I don't put anything on Github if I can avoid it. Disgusting organization with awful management.
Tangentially, I don't get how developers on the one hand strive for private offices and no (physical) interruptions, but on the other want to communicate through chat channels. Maybe these are different people altogether, and I'm just getting the wrong impression. But personally I prefer a little personal interaction over a long chat.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But if your entire infrastructure is centrally managed and can disappear at a company's whim, you're setting your community up for problems.
This applies to Freenode as much as it applies to Slack. If freenode disappears, people using its channels for foss will have similar issues and inconvenience as if Slack/Discord disappear and in both cases, it's recoverable.
It's frustrating that the choice seems to be between modern closed tools like Slack and Hangouts and antiquated open tools like IRC and mailing lists.
Question for you: I hear this a lot, in terms of older tools being considered obsolete. Other than the natural human tendency towards novelty and the network effects, what, exactly, is obsolete about mailing lists or IRC? What features are missing in IRC that Slack has for synchronous discussion? (I'll start: animated dancing pigs out of the box and the need to write/plug in your own archiver.) What limitations do ma…
Mailing lists by themselves are terrible, because there's no history. You can't scroll up to find context for the conversation. You can get public archives, but then where you actually use the mailing list and where you go to look at history are completely separate, which is a terrible UX. Google groups mostly fixes this because they're really just a forum that supports emails.
IRC is terrible because everyone has their own client, so you never actually know what someone will see when you post something. Post a link, - will it get auto-expanded? How will it look? Will it get auto-linked? If you @ someone, will they get notified? if so, how visibly?
IRC also has the multi-login problem - it gets confused if I log in from my phone and my laptop. To get a persistent history of IRC requires running an external service which is way beyond most users.
Slack has mindshare, which leads to having a ton of integrations with other platforms, which just multiplies its effectiveness.
I 100% agree that I wish they offered a publicly visible option, so anyone can view without logging in. I also wish they natively supported self-registration.
I have to echo another commenter on here. If you want the best of all worlds, a forum is what you're looking for. Publicly visible, easily linkable, long form, asychronous communication. Whether that's google groups or something else is up to you.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A few people have replied, saying how to get chat history with IRC, but as far as I can tell, none of them work like Slack. With Slack, you can see history from before the first time you connect. It looks like none of the IRC solutions enable that; the IRC protocol doesn't make it possible, without the server (or a channel member) keeping logs. (I haven't used either very much, so please correct me if I'm wrong.)
IRCCloud can, they're a client too :) I highly recommend them if you are serious about IRC. But yes you're right, nothing in the IRC protocol for it. There is something in IRCv3 to provide chat history but I don't know if it's even in the current version of the spec. https://www.irccloud.com/
(You say "they're a client too" - I confess, I don't know what they are apart from a client.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it's anything like my experience, the trip from clicking on the button to open the app and wait for the myriad of redirects, before clicking through to the page you actually want to monitor is non-trivial (and sometimes doesn't occur if the tab isn't in the foreground). I don't have that many open, and it still takes me around 5 minutes every day to open them back up.
At least you have SSO! Imagine what if you had different credentials to each of these services (even logins)! There are big companies that operate like that...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
IRCCloud can, they're a client too :) I highly recommend them if you are serious about IRC. But yes you're right, nothing in the IRC protocol for it. There is something in IRCv3 to provide chat history but I don't know if it's even in the current version of the spec. https://www.irccloud.com/
How does it do this? When you use IRCCloud to go to a channel for the first time, where does IRCCloud get the history for that channel from? (You say "they're a client too" - I confess, I don't know what they are apart from a client.)
At the moment if you join a channel you can't read its backlog, no. They could implement it though if they used logs from their users... kinda wish they would. But hey.
Is that really happening that open source communities use Slack as their primary communications channel? I haven't seen that happening in the communities I participate in (Python/Django/...). What I do see is that more and more communities switch from IRC to Slack as the primary "sync" channel (while still maintaining mailing lists, bug trackers and the like). And as much as I hate it, the success can't be denied. Es…
I was at a dev meetup for Python: I really thought he was joking when he said, what is IRC? And then I realized that we have a whole generation of devs that have no idea what IRC is or how to use it. Amazing the amount of knowledge and experience lost between a single generation.
It might be more useful to speak in general terms than call out Slack in particular. The concerns expressed here aren't limited to Slack (despite the link-baity title), but any form of communication that: (a) Can't be referenced or linked from the Web, and (b) Is a form of synchronous communication The same factors, BTW, apply equally to in-person discussions held at open source conferences. I wonder what the author…
What drives me nuts is that there are so many of these things. I know groups that (for business or pleasure) use Slack, Discord, Skype, Google Hangouts, IRC, etc. All of these clients are a bit more obstrusive than they need to be in terms of pop-up notifications, software updates, cpu, memory, transfer, etc. They all screw up enough that there's always a little apprehension that something will go wrong when you get…