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Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

status.slack.com

191–200 of 246 posts

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#191
post #145
post #74

Can someone explain to me why any company should outsource something as critical as internal communication to a company that is 5 years old? The video messaging left aside, is it really that better than time-tested solutions like email or just running an IRC server?

IRC is pretty much useless since you don't have history. Comparing Slack and IRC are like comparing TCP and HTML5. Why IRC is pretty bad in enterprise: - no audio / video - no history - no SSO / AD integration - no rich features like links, pictures, upload docs ect ... - easy bot integration with APIs, I can have Datadog pushing things to Slack ( alerts, graph... ) - no archiving channels on the go, Slack is very us…

IRC is a protocol.

The features you're listing is server/client dependent.

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#192
post #184
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> another "but" That's my entire point. It's death by a thousand cuts. Now I'm responsible for an IRC server, a web frontend, a mobile app and a bouncer. The OP said "just run an IRC server". There is no "Slack or just an IRC server". There's "Slack or a number of connected, interdependent services you need to maintain". I'm not saying it can't be done, or that it isn't the right answer for some people, but it's also…

Why is paying another company better than getting employees and paying them the same or even less money?! When did this madness start?

In what world is it going to be "the same or even less money" to hire one or two sysadmins on a full-time basis than paying for a Slack subscription?

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#193
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes sense to have a fallback method set ahead of time, as others have mentioned. You won't have access to the things slack integrates with but at least you can talk. I know some people use IRC as a low-dependency fallback channel.

we use a mumble server as backup and parallel mean to discuss in the operations department... Sometimes talking all together using voice as if we were in the same office is much nicer than writing!

Mumble / murmur [1] is great. I set one up for a family member in minutes. Super easy to deploy. People should use their RC releases. They are solid, sound quality is great and it scales really well. A small to medium VM can handle thousands of people.

[1] - https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Main_Page

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#194
post #192
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is paying another company better than getting employees and paying them the same or even less money?! When did this madness start?

In what world is it going to be "the same or even less money" to hire one or two sysadmins on a full-time basis than paying for a Slack subscription?

I don't know how large your company is, but with 10k+ employees, it's suddenly a reasonable option.

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#195
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC is pretty much useless since you don't have history. Comparing Slack and IRC are like comparing TCP and HTML5. Why IRC is pretty bad in enterprise: - no audio / video - no history - no SSO / AD integration - no rich features like links, pictures, upload docs ect ... - easy bot integration with APIs, I can have Datadog pushing things to Slack ( alerts, graph... ) - no archiving channels on the go, Slack is very us…

matrix does all that and can be self hosted - ours is.

Does the opensource matrix server scale? I may be wrong but I got the impression it was more an example implementation and was not used by Matrix in production?

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#196
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a serious question? Companies have been using email for internal announcements for decades.

And without proper mailing-list-moderation, that too can cause email storms. No one blames "the genius who decided to put everyone in one mailing list" when that happens. The real fail here isn't putting everyone in one channel. The real fail is not using/providing proper admin tools

I'm going to guess you could also break IBM's phone system by attempting to start a conference call with 200K people on it, and destroy their auditorium by putting too many people on the stage.

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#197
post #62

reminds me of that one time a genius at IBM created an `ibm-global-announcements` channel and force-invited 200'000 people in it, and then some guy `@channel`d and all ibm's slack workspaces were down for 30 minutes https://status.slack.com/ibm/2018-03/f01d4c22cd953dd7 https://i.imgur.com/Rk6Kdgp.png EDIT: also that channel made using slack impossible for mac book air users, they had around 80% cpu usage for slack. s…

I still hate that anyone can add anyone to a channel - it's not an "invite", it's just global "add to room" privileges. In general I find Slack not very concerned with your own ability to control your experience (no ignore user feature, can be added to rooms, can be added to rooms that then get pinged with @channel and your notifications start blowing up, etc). This may be 'expected' in a small company where of cours…

Even worse than the channel mechanic is the thread mechanic - anyone can turn your comment to a thread, and you cannot mute threads by default. Even worse, updates to threads suppress channel unread notifications, causing you to miss updates.

Manually having to follow threads and unfollow threads is a nightmare compared to the one time configure experience of channels, especially since you cannot just mute all threads, and is easily the worst part of Slack to me.

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#198
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a serious question? Companies have been using email for internal announcements for decades.

And without proper mailing-list-moderation, that too can cause email storms. No one blames "the genius who decided to put everyone in one mailing list" when that happens. The real fail here isn't putting everyone in one channel. The real fail is not using/providing proper admin tools

We definitely blame the genius that didn't BCC an email with hundreds of individual emails (when a mailing list isn't used)

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to tell everyone in your company something, you could email them I guess. Is it the fact that it's a "chat room" which means you expect it not to work? What's best, here? SMS? Email? Putting something on the website and making everyone check the website once a day at noon? Tell one in ten people and get them to "pass it on"?

Is this a serious question? Companies have been using email for internal announcements for decades.

Although usually only a limited number of people can post to an "announce-list" that goes to everyone in the company. (And if there are company-wide lists that anyone can post to, most users filter those to a folder. I suspect such lists don't scale past a certain point either.)

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to some prospective studies, some people would (and please stay with me on that) actually use slack to communicate about work-related matters with co-workers . More study are needed to clarify if this work-related communication might actually be required for work to get done. (Cal Newport is definitely preparing a book on that any time soon.) Unfortunately, the researchers are too busy maintaining their IRC…

But it says slack right on the box

That is a remarkably good point that I can't believe I hadn't noticed. What a strange thing to name a product that one would try to sell as Enterprise productivity software.
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