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Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

status.slack.com

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Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#231

Post by jbverschoor »

foxylion wrote: post #224
pmlnr wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen those numbers. You could easily afford paying sysadmins with those numbers.

But managing an IRC server cluster for 10.000+ users is no simple task. Paying experts in their field (chat tools in this case) is most of the time the most reliable and cheapest variant. You must also include that Slack has plenty of features that are not available in IRC and mean the productivity is not as good.

Since when is running any service for a number of people something people compare with running google?

30 years ago, efnet was (apparently) 35k users.

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#232

Post by trickstra »

lqet wrote: 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?

Our company switched from self-hosted RocketChat to Slack just this week. Personally I didn't agree with it, but it's not my call. The reason was mostly that Op guys were too busy with other things and didn't want to care about yet another critical company-wide service. They though outsourcing it would solve the downtimes and bugs. This outage couldn't come at a better time.

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#233

Post by pmart123 »

lqet wrote: 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?

I’ve heard from countless of friends how many times Outlook goes down for their company, whether it’s a midsize company or a large company. I don’t think this is unique to Slack or company age.

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#234

Post by bichiliad »

lqet wrote: 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?

We used to run an IRC server at work, and it was pretty exclusionary to non-engineers; setting up something that'd log backscroll required maintaining a vm somewhere, searching through history required another service, etc. If all slack does is chat (and video communication by way of an acquisiton), I'm happy letting them be 5 years old. I'd scrutinize a company that: 1. has no fallback mechanism of Slack is mission-critical and goes offline 2. isn't careful about including non-technical stakeholders in communications.

Edit: clarifying that I'm talking about my workplace, not a company I run.

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#235

Post by Karunamon »

untog wrote: post #169
Karunamon wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For something like IRC? Yes. The service is dead simple and one server can handle thousands of users with modest hardware and without breaking a sweat. A completely unfamiliar sysadmin could set it up in an hour or less. Since it's probably internal, there's little need for public services (nick/channel registration, etc).

So what about the mobile device issue? Corporate logins? If you want to match what Slack offers you aren't just running an IRC server, you're going to have a small fleet of dependent services that, added up, just about match what Slack does. Is it really that surprising that people just opt to pay for someone to deal with all of this for them?

At which point you're not looking at IRC as a service anymore. There are different niches served - but the question was about the reasonableness of setting up IRC alone, which is still dead easy.

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#236

Post by lwhalen »

asah wrote: post #151
thg wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://mattermost.com/

We use this at my company - perfectly reasonable UI, don't know about the APIs/integrations, which I assume are way behind Slack...

The Mattermost API is a superset of Slack's. "Most" integrations "just work", the rest need a minimum of tweaking to DTRT.

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#237

Post by zild3d »

lwhalen wrote: post #236
asah wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use this at my company - perfectly reasonable UI, don't know about the APIs/integrations, which I assume are way behind Slack...

The Mattermost API is a superset of Slack's. "Most" integrations "just work", the rest need a minimum of tweaking to DTRT.

Mattermost API being a superset of Slack's seems to be mostly true, but looking at the features our Slack app uses I don't see block kit (https://api.slack.com/block-kit) or message scheduling. If we were to integrate with Mattermost it doesn't look like it'd be a ton of work though

Have to say Mattermost's API docs are so much easier to read than Slack's.

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#238

Post by LinuxBender »

untog wrote: post #169
Karunamon wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For something like IRC? Yes. The service is dead simple and one server can handle thousands of users with modest hardware and without breaking a sweat. A completely unfamiliar sysadmin could set it up in an hour or less. Since it's probably internal, there's little need for public services (nick/channel registration, etc).

So what about the mobile device issue? Corporate logins? If you want to match what Slack offers you aren't just running an IRC server, you're going to have a small fleet of dependent services that, added up, just about match what Slack does. Is it really that surprising that people just opt to pay for someone to deal with all of this for them?

Put TheLounge [1] in front of it for people that want a web interface. Perhaps use ldap for corp users. [2]

[1] - https://thelounge.chat/

[2] - https://thelounge.chat/docs/configuration#ldap-support

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#239

Post by icelancer »

zild3d wrote: post #237
lwhalen wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Mattermost API is a superset of Slack's. "Most" integrations "just work", the rest need a minimum of tweaking to DTRT.

Mattermost API being a superset of Slack's seems to be mostly true, but looking at the features our Slack app uses I don't see block kit ( https://api.slack.com/block-kit ) or message scheduling. If we were to integrate with Mattermost it doesn't look like it'd be a ton of work though Have to say Mattermost's API docs are so much easier to read than Slack's.

Slack's API documentation and handling of accounts/bots is so obscure. I've never seen anything that bad from a major company.

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#240

Post by LinuxBender »

pmlnr wrote: post #180
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you make it possible for people to view the IRC channel history when they were disconnected? I know you can have a bot that saves a log, but can it be made seamless? I think it's really sad how the world has migrated away from an open protocol to a closed one, but I remember IRC having some very real annoyances, well beyond stuff like integrations.

The answer is in at the bottom of my previous entry. It's called an IRC bouncer.

bouncer, or web client that persists chats, like TheLounge or Convos.
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