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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

#921

Post by int_19h »

shantly wrote: post #309
goostavos wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet a large percentage of Slack people _tried super hard_ to stop that cohort of PMs. However, you can only fight upwards so much before you just check out completely, cash the checks, and halfheartedly build whatever nonsense they're forcing through.

It's really demoralizing to be on a team on which the devs clearly have better design and UX sense than the designer(s) and/or product manager. But not the titles—they're "just" software developers who couldn't possibly understand users or design or common friggin' sense.

Sometimes, the devs can sneak in a hidden fix. For example, remember back when VS 2012 made menus ALL CAPS? Officially, that was the brave new world everybody was supposed to live in (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/a-design-with-al...). Users hated it with a passion.

And then it turned out that there's an undocumented registry key to re-enable the old behavior, that was leaked without much fanfare (https://www.richard-banks.org/2012/06/how-to-prevent-visual-...). It was never mentioned in any official documentation, but word of mouth spread it far and wide, and its existence probably spared the worst in terms of angry user rants.

Ironically, the outcry over the caps was big enough that this setting eventually got an official checkbox in a major release sometime later, and then became the default behavior again.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#922

Post by mullingitover »

chris_wot wrote: post #502
_jal wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad sign. If the rank and file are afraid to give honest internal feedback, they have a management problem. At least for me, that's a time-to-leave signal.

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

Did Teams ever fix that issue where every channel is Hotel California, as in you can never leave?

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#923

Post by lovehashbrowns »

sean0- wrote: post #901

Supposedly this feature is being walked back now. I just received the following from their support. I'm ecstatic to hear this and hope their Product Management has reassessed the importance of non-WYSIWYG inputs. >>> We really appreciate your feedback, and we hear your frustration. We're sorry for the impact this is having on your ability to communicate with your team and on your overall productivity. We made a mista…

First off, that's super good to hear. Secondly, I'm absolutely flabbergasted that this reaction wasn't obvious to them from the get-go. This isn't the first time some silly addition of a wysiwyg feature has ended in outrage. What's even more astounding is that I don't think there are many features as despised as wysiwyg. It's up there with comic sans. Why make your entire UI revolve around one of the most despised features in the UX world?

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#925

Post by cryptonector »

epanchin wrote: post #577
guessmyname wrote: post #46

This is funny because I work across the street of Slack’s office in Vancouver, Canada and two Slack engineers who I frequently chat with during our daily commute already told me they —and a handful of other employees— hate the WYSIWYG input box too, but were afraid to express their feelings because their role is irrelevant compared to the people who made the decision to ship it.

Please ask them what they think of the ‘drafts’ section. I’m so fed up of losing chats to that section.

Oh yes, please please stop that.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#926

Post by jv22222 »

sean0- wrote: post #901

Supposedly this feature is being walked back now. I just received the following from their support. I'm ecstatic to hear this and hope their Product Management has reassessed the importance of non-WYSIWYG inputs. >>> We really appreciate your feedback, and we hear your frustration. We're sorry for the impact this is having on your ability to communicate with your team and on your overall productivity. We made a mista…

Now, if only Atlassian could solve "CLOUD-7184: More Easily Change Atlassian/JIRA Cloud URL Domain"

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CLOUD-7184

With 740 companies asking for it ;)

Submitted in 2014.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#927

Post by nikisweeting »

nh2 wrote: post #196
StavrosK wrote: post #39

At the risk of sounding like a shill, I'd like to shill Zulip. We started using it instead of Slack, and it has been amazing . It's fast, everything is designed to help you get to conversations quickly, keyboard accessibility is second to none and the streams is a much better default than rooms. I can't recommend it enough, it's well worth the money even though they have a nice free tier and are OSS so you can self-h…

What's keeping me on Slack instead of Zulip is its inability to mark messages as unread [1] (Alt+Click on Slack). I think that's critical for a communication app when you want to ensure that you've answered all things that need answering. [1] https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/2676

Zulip lets you star messages though, and they show up in a separate inbox, so you can effectively bookmark things to come back to later.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#928

Post by nikisweeting »

StavrosK wrote: post #39

At the risk of sounding like a shill, I'd like to shill Zulip. We started using it instead of Slack, and it has been amazing . It's fast, everything is designed to help you get to conversations quickly, keyboard accessibility is second to none and the streams is a much better default than rooms. I can't recommend it enough, it's well worth the money even though they have a nice free tier and are OSS so you can self-h…

I've been hosting a personal server, a company server, and servers for every one of clients since we started as a web consulting company.

It's far superior to Slack for remote work in our experience because it's designed to be primarily used asynchronously, as opposed to something like Slack/IRC where you have a wall of unread messages all mixed together every time you sign in.

The biggest difference is that every conversation must have a topic title and be put into a stream, giving all the benefits of forums or email threads with subjects. Compare that to Slack/IRC where the the default mode is putting your messages in big firehose channels that don't encourage breaking individual conversions out into separate threads.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#929

Post by stock_toaster »

kelseydh wrote: post #353
bartread wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This reminds me of Atlassian's god-awful WYSIWYG editor. Oh my goodness: triggered. I've barred the use of Confluence at our company specifically because of this. "But, but, we used it at blah company." "Yes, so did I at blahblah company, and it was unbelievably crappy and made me angry every time I had to edit a document: we're not using it." I DO NOT want to have to use what amounts to an extremely buggy, caprici…

Yeah, the very first time I used Confluence I was in shock of how developer's at one time could have thought this was a good or useful product for discussing/planning code changes. For ticketing software, I find Clubhouse to be much better than JIRA. Normal markdown that doesn't drive you insane. Much slicker all around.

Apparently clubhouse is working on an integrated wiki system[1] too. Can't wait to try it out (alas, beta invite not avail for the free account my company is currently using for evaluation).

[1]: https://clubhouse.io/blog/write-beta

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#930

Post by it33 »

vxNsr wrote: post #917
it33 wrote: post #891

Mattermost CEO here. In my mind Slack’s target persona is no longer an engineer (if it ever was) - It is more likely a less tech savvy person who wants a WYSIWYG editor for rich text inputs. For what it’s worth, Mattermost is an open source alternative built for engineers by engineers. The interface is markdown.

Hey, have there ever been discussions about a making a truly native client? not a web wrapper? imo a fast native client, that doesn't look like a sad slack clone (which teams currently does) would put you streets ahead of the entire field. I know it means increasing code complexity. but by golly would it be nice to have a truly nice client.

Yes, there's an on-going discussion about going to native clients. One path is React Native going desktop, similar to how we've done our iOS and Android apps. We should probably do something about encouraging some early prototyping.

Highly appreciate the feedback,

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