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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

#931
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.

Microsoft has only just implemented (in preview) the ability to change the name/URL of your SharePoint site[0], a feature that has been widely requested for well over a decade.

Atlassian users might have a while to wait yet :-)

[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/change-site-addr...

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#932
post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's Mattermost[1], which is an open source alternative to Slack. I haven't tried it yet so can't vouch for how it compares. [1] https://mattermost.com

I had a lot of issues with mattermost delivering messages out of order and constantly getting disconnected with “retry” on lots of messages. Not saying you’ll have the same issues, but definitely turned me off. :/

Mattermost CEO here,

Hi Dijit,

Highly appreciate the feedback. Definitely want you to have an amazing experience on Mattermost, and I'm sorry you're having issues.

If you go to "About" can you see which build you're running, whether it's a stable or unstable release?

Odd number releases are stable "Quality Releases", e.g. 5.17, even number releases are unstable "Feature" releases, e.g. 5.16.

Also, we probably need to add more diagnostics into our clients, as some issues come from how people choose to deploy the backend server.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#933
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…

Funny how different the response I got from them yesterday versus what you got today. “Not in our roadmap to have an option to go back” is rather dramatically different. Power of outcry I guess, I’ll take it!

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#934

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly - Slack has matched the formatting in WhatsApp, which pretty much everyone outside America uses. Far fewer people have even heard of Markdown. It's still really annoying though.

A lot of people in America uses WhatsApp. It's by far the most popular messaging platform in Brazil[0][1]. In other places in South and Central America it's also about as popular as in Brazil, so I suspect the majority of internet-connected people in America use it. That said, WhatsApp is not a tool I use mostly on the computer to talk to my tech friends and co-workers, where I need efficient ways to communicate both…

In English, “America” refers to the USA, 99.9% of the time. (This is not just true in the US but also in the UK and I am pretty sure other English-speaking countries too).

What is called “América” in Spanish and Portuguese, we call “the Americas” and consider to be two continents (North America and South America), not one.

I have no opinion on which usage is “correct”. Just pointing out that the person you’re replying to almost certainly used “America” to mean the USA, not the land mass that includes Brazil.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#935
I wrote this up twenty-two days ago. Ticket details: "the new text input is whack." Support Request #2490163

And I pushed back later after the first round of "yeah, it's the new normal, don't you like it," I wrote back with, "Yeah, no. This is a train wreck." And went on from there.

Heading now to post the URL to this discussion as a supplement to my ticket .

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#936
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…

Just for anyone who'd like some confirmation of this. Their official Twitter account it's also saying the same[1] I'm glad they listened to the feedback but their attitude towards people who wrote in with bugs/criticism should also be learned from. Being told 'We know what's best for you, we're not reverting the changes' was pretty insulting. [1] https://mobile.twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/119764013617293721...

And in more than one place, viz., https://mobile.twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/119764819999085772...

And something that occurred to me: if it's true that "in the future everyone will code (to some degree)," don't you think it's OK to start the baby steps of textual thinking?

C'mon, it's markup with like six modes, people. Practice for half as long as you're on in one day and you'll be fluent.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#937
I'm glad they're walking back on this.

But in general, I'm noticing more and more that some product and UX designers seem to be trying to pass utterly broken stuff as "oh you're just not used to it yet" type of thing, which is extremely annoying. People have been explaining the EXACT problem to Slack on Twitter since Nov 7, and they clearly said that "we don't want that" many times in the thread.

It's not the wrong decision in rolling this out with no opt-out that is the problem, it's the fucking insistince on "no it's just all the thousands of you complaining, and not us" that gets me. And they had many opportunities to admit this.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#938

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

Doesn’t matter. Orgs are moving to Teams in droves. I personally know four 50k+ orgs moving to Teams just in the last 6 months. Slack’s pricing is not helping them either.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#939
post #749
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…

> We are committed to doing what we can to improve the new experience for you What an insincere message. If they were committed , they’d offer the option. They don’t want to and that’s their right, but implying they value feedback and just doing what they want is throwing sand in the user’s eyes.

The fact that we _still_ can't disable the drafts "feature" says a lot about how little they listen to user feedback. I've not found a single person who likes that behavior, the behavior doesn't make any sense. There is a good reason almost literally every other chat app with a similar feature simply uses color/icons to indicate the same thing.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#940

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.

On another topic, someone recently posted this youtube video of a Norwegian engineer explaining her views on tech worker ethics, how we've got here and maybe a way to fix it or atleast improve on the current situation. I'd recommend showing it to your commute buddies.

It really resonated with my thoughts, how I've viewed the tech world and my (tiny) part in it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfNIiitVFtc

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