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Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

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Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#721
post #528

I have contacted them, and they replied me with this Lucas (Slack) Nov 20, 9:15 PM PST Hi there, Thank you for taking the time to write in and provide this feedback. I apologize for the disruption to your existing workflows. Our aim is to build an editor that works for all Slack users to better format their messages and clearly communicate in channels, regardless of their technical expertise. While we are taking all…

Sent an email this morning. Will update if I get a response.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. I'd made some nice (and quite simple) tooling to parse docstrings out of a Python project and turn them into Markdown that I could copy-and-paste into Confluence. It was so convenient to run something like "make documents" to basically compile the project's documentation from inspecting the project itself! But then Confluence broke their editor by making it WYSIWYG-only. And in response, I broke Confluence…

What is something else? I’m interested, if it’s available for download (not cloud).

Been working on Documize[0] for a while now and we get plenty of Confluence people moving over.

Open source core supporting WYSIWYG, Markdown, Code and more.

[0] https://github.com/documize/community

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#723
post #700

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is another argument against using proprietary SaaS solutions for such crucial purposes as business communication. There are free open source alternatives which give you full control and privacy: Mattermost, Riot.im, Rocket.chat, Let's Chat.

We shouldn't fetishize control as much. In >15 years what I have seen is that OSS comes with a huge cost of attention - that you'd be better off focusing on your business need. Running most of these OSS even at a medium employee count scale is a full-team-commit-nightmare. It essentially means your it department now needs a specialist who will be able to handle your org quirks, remember the tweaks and keep baby sitti…

But isn't this not really and argument against FLOSS in this case? Isn't support the entire business model of, say RedHat?

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! I didn't know about Ripcord, and so far it is great. I am amazed how fast it is. I'm also depressed that this amazes me, as it basically does what mIRC did for me over a decade ago. This is developed in QT by one person, and it looks pretty feature-complete to me. I really don't understand why a company the size of Slack invests all their development effort into such a subpar platform as Electron, when a n…

> as it basically does what mIRC did for me over a decade ago When Atlassian finally pulled Hipchat last year I was tasked with finding the replacement. Turns out the one that met everybody's needs best was a local IRCd and whatever desktop client for it people liked. Some problems have been solved correctly for a while; chat is one of them.

I am an old-time IRC user, but IRC is missing tons of features I use literally every single day in Slack. It does not have well-functioning and reliable file transfers. It does not keep history of discussions. It does not have media embedding.

It is very far from a solution in 2019.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#726
post #700

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We shouldn't fetishize control as much. In >15 years what I have seen is that OSS comes with a huge cost of attention - that you'd be better off focusing on your business need. Running most of these OSS even at a medium employee count scale is a full-team-commit-nightmare. It essentially means your it department now needs a specialist who will be able to handle your org quirks, remember the tweaks and keep baby sitti…

We don't need OSS in this case, we need open protocols so anyone can use any other client, proprietary or not.

Open protocols without OSS tend not to be particularly robust. In this instance, we have both: open protocols like Matrix.org, XMPP & IRC - and open source servers & clients (like synapse & Riot.im on the Matrix side), which are no longer an opensource curiousity but ready for primetime as Slack/Discord replacements. Just as Apache is ready for primetime as an IIS replacement.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#727
post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expressed my discontent to them as well and just received this reply: "I'm afraid there is no way to disable this at the moment, and it's not in the roadmap to roll back on this feature. That said, we're still in the initial stages here, so our focus right now is listening to feedback as we consider certain changes for improvement as we move forward. You've raised some fair points here, so I've shared your feedback…

I mailed them too, and got a human response instantly. They're good at that.

Yea, having about ~2K employees for chat app company also helps in getting human response

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#728
post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does everything need to cater to idiots instead of making them learn? If we continue down this trend we’ll end up with keyboards with a single button to cater to some monkeys out there who can’t manage to use a proper keyboard, at the expense of everyone else’s productivity. Is this the future we really want?

Because they’re not idiots but rather people with different priorities and backgrounds who were underserved previously. You might disagree that this is helpful but it’s unlikely that you know more about Slack’s users than their UX team. Treating everyone involved with respect is a much better strategy than what you’re doing.

Then provide an option. There's no need to cripple some of your users for the sake of others.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#729

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that Microsoft Teams is literally an existential threat, they really want to listen to feedback internally!

Microsoft Teams is pretty horrible

It doesn't matter. It's part of the Microsoft enterprise offerings. If you don't want to get replaced by one of their products, which the CIO will do just to make his/her own life easier, then you better make a product everyone wants.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#730
post #700

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is another argument against using proprietary SaaS solutions for such crucial purposes as business communication. There are free open source alternatives which give you full control and privacy: Mattermost, Riot.im, Rocket.chat, Let's Chat.

We shouldn't fetishize control as much. In >15 years what I have seen is that OSS comes with a huge cost of attention - that you'd be better off focusing on your business need. Running most of these OSS even at a medium employee count scale is a full-team-commit-nightmare. It essentially means your it department now needs a specialist who will be able to handle your org quirks, remember the tweaks and keep baby sitti…

But you don’t want to go full ducking SaaS with things as well, where you don’t know what is coming until the ‘improvement’ is foisted upon you. Software gone mad. Spoken as a SaaS vendor
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