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Unslacking Tideways Company

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Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#121

Post by dsr_ »

gilbetron wrote: post #115
john_oshea wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any recommendations for sensible forum software? (self-hosted would be ideal)

Great question, and I'm eager to hear the results. We're going to try creating a private subreddit to test the idea of forums for "long form discussions". I used vBulletin back around the early 00s, and I loved it, but I've found a number of people don't "get" forums. Discourse is something else I'd like to try. I'm curious why people don't like forums for discussions.

Forums rarely get things right -- that had been solved by Usenet.

Proper threading.

Read/Unread tracking.

Keyboard UI. (And the mouse UI tends to be bad as well.)

Responsiveness. (Especially: page loads which are not instantaneous.)

Killfiles.

They generally have mediocre search functions unless they are entirely visible to Google.

These are off the top of my head.

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#122

Post by tomp »

dsr_ wrote: post #121
gilbetron wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great question, and I'm eager to hear the results. We're going to try creating a private subreddit to test the idea of forums for "long form discussions". I used vBulletin back around the early 00s, and I loved it, but I've found a number of people don't "get" forums. Discourse is something else I'd like to try. I'm curious why people don't like forums for discussions.

Forums rarely get things right -- that had been solved by Usenet. Proper threading. Read/Unread tracking. Keyboard UI. (And the mouse UI tends to be bad as well.) Responsiveness. (Especially: page loads which are not instantaneous.) Killfiles. They generally have mediocre search functions unless they are entirely visible to Google. These are off the top of my head.

Does usenet have points? That's what I find missing in most forums, except Reddit and HN, where best comments flow towards the top, instead of being present arbitrarily deep in the timeline.

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#123

Post by redler »

VectorLock wrote: post #106
stupidbird wrote: post #102

Doing everything in chat is pure insanity. It's great for the day-to-day collaborating on projects... but it's all short-term memory. Are you going to be referencing a chat from 3 years ago? We use an internal forum in addition to chat. Anything substantive goes in the forum. We'll regularly reference 5 year old posts.

If you can reference 5 year old forum posts why can't you reference 3 year old chat conversations?

I’m guessing the word “internal” has a lot to do with it.

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#124

Post by howard941 »

tomp wrote: post #122
dsr_ wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forums rarely get things right -- that had been solved by Usenet. Proper threading. Read/Unread tracking. Keyboard UI. (And the mouse UI tends to be bad as well.) Responsiveness. (Especially: page loads which are not instantaneous.) Killfiles. They generally have mediocre search functions unless they are entirely visible to Google. These are off the top of my head.

Does usenet have points? That's what I find missing in most forums, except Reddit and HN, where best comments flow towards the top, instead of being present arbitrarily deep in the timeline.

Sorry, no native point system. You can bolt on something NoCeM-like, server or newsreader based, and enjoy distributing article reputation right now. But it supplies only a show/no show signal out of the box. I think the cancelmoose would have preferred it to be somehow more nuanced and only live in newsreaders...

http://home.httrack.net/~nocem/

https://www.systutorials.com/docs/linux/man/8-perl-nocem/

https://www.techopedia.com/definition/18172/cancelmoose

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#125

Post by paulie_a »

sdan wrote: post #7

Definitely agree with your decision. After leaving slack entirely from a robotics team and a science club, our productively increased. No longer were we going off topic wasting precious time and making everyone in the channel read every 500+ messages some people engaged in. We instead chose to make more plans during meetings and through direct chat (Messenger). However, Slack is usefull for forums such as donkeycar.s…

Slack is useful for group chat of 3-5 people. Occasionally a channel will have useful information. And then it's mostly important for coordinating lunch and sharing funny links.

I'd say it's a 50/50 on work related and just screwing around.

And sidenote I am not sure where term "ping you" came from, but it needs to go away. It honestly conveys the message I don't need to or want to talk to the person that said it.

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#126

Post by rabidrat »

addicted wrote: post #107
rabidrat wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So now you have to store each email that includes important information in a second place, so that you remember to include it in their onboarding. Why not just post it to the intranet in a well-known location in the first place?

Ideally the information goes where it’s supposed to in your permanent knowledge repo. This could be a wiki, a website, etc. The email is sent as a notification that the content has been added, updated or moved. Email should ideally serve as a notification system and a lossy communication system where things you want to retain need to be backed up somewhere else. The nice thing wth email is that being an open eco syst…

Right. But too often, as gregmac said, "people send mass company emails with, for example, new policy or forms attached, and don't post them elsewhere". Email should be used for notification and ephemeral communication, and not for information dissemination. In that way it's the same as chat.

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#127

Post by bonestamp2 »

paulie_a wrote: post #125
sdan wrote: post #7

Definitely agree with your decision. After leaving slack entirely from a robotics team and a science club, our productively increased. No longer were we going off topic wasting precious time and making everyone in the channel read every 500+ messages some people engaged in. We instead chose to make more plans during meetings and through direct chat (Messenger). However, Slack is usefull for forums such as donkeycar.s…

Slack is useful for group chat of 3-5 people. Occasionally a channel will have useful information. And then it's mostly important for coordinating lunch and sharing funny links. I'd say it's a 50/50 on work related and just screwing around. And sidenote I am not sure where term "ping you" came from, but it needs to go away. It honestly conveys the message I don't need to or want to talk to the person that said it.

> I am not sure where term "ping you" came from

I assume it's like using sports euphemisms in the office to convey a concept... this is likely a military euphemism (from radar/sonar). On one hand I don't mind it because it removes the specifics about how the person will contact you, it just simply states that they will contact you (and the method may vary depending on the time of day/week). Sure, there are other ways to say that, just as there are other ways to say something is "on deck" or you're "punting" a decision.

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#128

Post by bonestamp2 »

hermanradtke wrote: post #68
quixoticaxolotl wrote: post #62

I feel that many of these objections already have solutions within Slack. If you don't want to be disturbed by notifications, there is the Do Not Disturb option to snooze notifications. If you don't want to lose context, use Slack threads, which localize discussion around an issue to a single place. If you have a fear of missing out because you're piping everything to Slack - have you considered segregating your aler…

I agree that slack can have a place as long as there are expectations around what to use it for. How do people coordinate around incidents without something like slack? It used to be that everyone had to hop on a conference bridge, which I personally never liked. For important discussions and decisions, we often paste a log of a chat and a link into tickets or change requests. This helps capture the conversation and…

We use everything. We work with a lot of other companies on a very large project and every company uses something different. But, I would say most of my messages come in by Slack or Skype.

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#129

Post by Jedd »

paulie_a wrote: post #125
sdan wrote: post #7

Definitely agree with your decision. After leaving slack entirely from a robotics team and a science club, our productively increased. No longer were we going off topic wasting precious time and making everyone in the channel read every 500+ messages some people engaged in. We instead chose to make more plans during meetings and through direct chat (Messenger). However, Slack is usefull for forums such as donkeycar.s…

Slack is useful for group chat of 3-5 people. Occasionally a channel will have useful information. And then it's mostly important for coordinating lunch and sharing funny links. I'd say it's a 50/50 on work related and just screwing around. And sidenote I am not sure where term "ping you" came from, but it needs to go away. It honestly conveys the message I don't need to or want to talk to the person that said it.

> And sidenote I am not sure where term "ping you" came from, but it needs to go away. It honestly conveys the message I don't need to or want to talk to the person that said it.

It's weird, isn't it. We all have our triggers, I suppose.

For example, I assume anyone who explicitly qualifies only a small number of their comments with 'tbh' or 'Honestly...' is lying to me the rest of the time.

Re: Unslacking Tideways Company

#130

Post by saalweachter »

bonestamp2 wrote: post #127
paulie_a wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack is useful for group chat of 3-5 people. Occasionally a channel will have useful information. And then it's mostly important for coordinating lunch and sharing funny links. I'd say it's a 50/50 on work related and just screwing around. And sidenote I am not sure where term "ping you" came from, but it needs to go away. It honestly conveys the message I don't need to or want to talk to the person that said it.

> I am not sure where term "ping you" came from I assume it's like using sports euphemisms in the office to convey a concept... this is likely a military euphemism (from radar/sonar). On one hand I don't mind it because it removes the specifics about how the person will contact you, it just simply states that they will contact you (and the method may vary depending on the time of day/week). Sure, there are other ways…

I assumed it was from the networking 'ping'.
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