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The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor

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Re: The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor

#101
What's more ridiculous is that this WYSIWYG editor is not only a front-end change, it changes the backend. And broke our bot. I have no idea why anything else should care. Their changelog didn't make the problem obvious.

Took me a bunch of time to track down the issue, as it worked for a few people, but the bot would completely ignore other people – including my boss.

https://github.com/nlopes/slack/issues/630

Re: The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor

#102
post #65
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just bring back IRC

Where did IRC go?

Away after botnets (and later dogecoin) figured out its a free decentralized comms platform and caused every major enterprise to block all IRC ports out of fear of being owned. At least this was my experience in the early 2000s, which is why I gave up on IRC circa 2006-ish. The death kneel was the lack of a google/apple cloud-backed IRC app, so any mobile use of IRC was pretty much a death wish for your battery (this may have changed but meh damage has already been done). Also all of dividebyzero's reasons listed above

Otherwise, all the major networks are still around and two or three of the really really really hardcore old school users from the 90s may still be around. I still ask random geeks I meet if they used to hang in #FreeBSD back in the day, hoping to reunite with old peoples.

Re: The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor

#103
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21592828

Well, I'm quite happy they had to shamefully walk that statement back - seems like it might have been a feature pushed arbitrarily by a C-level fiat rather than user research.

Having the WYSIWYG thing as an option is nice - forcing everyone into it less so.

Re: The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor

#104

In case anyone's interested, here's the Chromium bug(s) that's one of the main reasons the WYSIWYG editor has such issues in Chrome(/Electron): - https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=102937... - https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=608393 - https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=608162 The gist of it is that they "canonicalize" the DOM selection when you have two adjac…

It's mystifying, absolutely mystifying, to me that Slack shipped that editor when both electron and chrome show such obvious problems. What sort of out of control process let this get out, and also let them ignore bug reports for so long? This significantly lessens my opinion of Slack and their internal culture. In prior threads there were rumors that Slack employees were hesitant to give negative feedback internally…

When Slack first showed up, their development process seemed pretty fast and loose. There were tons of bugs and everyone who endured their initial forays into 2FA will probably remember the discussions of "Is Slack (the company) responsible enough for people to use the product in a mission critical application?" To be completely fair, they've tightened up their development process significantly and I'm actually pretty impressed that this is the first major gaff I've seen from them in a long time. I'm hoping its an aberration. I'm pretty public in saying that I don't really like SaaS offerings unless I get source code, but I have to use Slack at work, so I'm hoping they are successful ;-)

Re: The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor

#105
post #10

Bring back the IRC gateway.

Just bring back IRC

IRC hasn't gone anywhere, if you want to host a server for internal company use (or public use if you don't mind the bots) feel free to spin one up - or use freenode or whatever, they're still around.

But slack's strength for me comes from decent unfurling of links, threading and history searching - I could live without threading, but link unfurling is a hill I'll die on.

Re: The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha, I wish I could disable "threads" so nobody else can use them...

We have a culturally enforced strict rule of moving literally ALL new conversations into a subthread and I absolutely LOVE it. This means that if you want to respond to a comment, you never do it in the channel but in the subthread of _that_ comment. This means that when you browse the channel itself, each individual line represents a conversation on a specific topic. You can essentially browse the "headlines" of the…

You would love https://zulipchat.com/ (I have no association with them, their threading model is amazing though)

Re: The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor

#107
post #48

It is interesting to me that the rant post about Slack's WYSIWYG editor was the 18th most upvoted HN post of all time. No idea what conclusion should I draw from it, if any at all, but surprising for me at least.

lots of hn readers use slack lots of hn slack users disliked the feature lots of hn slack users who disliked the feature went straight to hn to vote up any post complaining about it that's how communities around tech broadly tend to work

Cough, cough

https://devrant.io

They closed the loop, folks!

Re: The latest version of Slack has a setting to disable the WYSIWYG editor

#110
post #58
post #12

"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 feedback on board, disabling the new formatting tool isn't an option that we will be offering."

> regardless of their technical expertise Good luck with that. Trying to make one product powerful enough for the techies yet simple enough for the normies is the software equivalent of Napoleon attacking Russia.

... In the winter.
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