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Users may be unable to connect or experiencing degraded performance

status.slack.com

71–80 of 225 posts

Re: Users may be unable to connect or experiencing degraded performance

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The message is in a light grey colour until it's confirmed. I'm not saying it's amazingly obvious but at least the information's there. In fact I'm mostly posting this comment so others know what to look for. (I know this because I just spent 60 seconnds staring at my message trying to figure out why the formatting was off before it told me it wasn't sent. It sent immediately when I retried though.)

I’ve had messages that were black for at least one minute turn gray and only then notify me that they failed to send

I had sequence of six messages that were not all delivered, and once they were delivered (because I clicked on each one of them) they were re-ordered, altering the my whole part of the conversation.

Re: Users may be unable to connect or experiencing degraded performance

#73
post #50

Why do companies spring for slack and webex when xmpp exists and works better?

Any of the below or all of the below (Not my own opinions, its a collection) 1. Another maintenance burden 2. You have some other company to scold or blame who is responsible for that. 3. Running it at scale. 4. Have to devote time for building features in market vs existing solutions. 5. Their UI/UX is not polished enough 6. sales bribed the manager 7. XMPP sucks for their use case.

Re: Users may be unable to connect or experiencing degraded performance

#74
post #52
post #11

Slack is unusable, but it did get me to restart Docker which had ballooned to 16 GB memory and a bazillion processes. Modern software development is something else

waiting the 10 seconds it takes to build a javascript frontend these days always leaves me reminiscing about my highschool days of editing my javascript in notepad and refreshing my browser to instantly see my mistakes. I understand there are benefits and reasons for the state of affairs...

I don't even have to refresh the browser to see my changes! (I use clojurescript with shadow-cljs, but similar tools with incremental rebuild and live reload exist for javascript)

Re: Users may be unable to connect or experiencing degraded performance

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not an implementation detail, it's a whole (controversial) UX design pattern: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/11/true-lies-of-optimi...

It's pretty necessary to inform users when messages haven't sent though, especially when these little failure indicators are hidden in the channels themselves - i.e you need to be looking at the message to know it failed. If I post a message in a channel and go back to work, I don't want to find out later when I check for replies that my message didn't actually send - I need a notification!

I don't like the pattern personally, I was just pointing out that this behavior is viewed by Slack as a feature and not a bug

Re: Users may be unable to connect or experiencing degraded performance

#78

This backend outage reveals how horrible the Slack UI is implemented. You post a message.... you think it got sent. Then 1min later, it tells you it was not.

I understand why they use this UI paradigm, but I don't understand why it's not reversed eg make it light grey until the API has confirmed it's been posted. That would maintain the nice 'you posted a message nice and quickly' responsive UI idea, but without making the user angry when it doesn't work.

Even if the idea is to fool the user in to thinking Slack is faster than it is, the UI could at least use the reversed 'light grey until confirmed' UI once it's detected that there's a problem. That would make it a bit less tiresome.

Re: Users may be unable to connect or experiencing degraded performance

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have both Slack and Teams. Almost everyone I know who has an option picks Slack.

I've never used Teams, but if everyone prefers Slack over it, it must be horrible.

There are a lot of other adjectives between "slack-like" and horrible.

I've used teams in the past and it's not that bad. It's a valid alternative to slack imho.

Re: Users may be unable to connect or experiencing degraded performance

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not an implementation detail, it's a whole (controversial) UX design pattern: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/11/true-lies-of-optimi...

Optimistic design is good, but you need to also tell the user when you’re being optimistic. iMessage, for example, “sends” a message, but it will also tell you when it’s been delivered so you can check to make sure.

Funny story—iMessage on one of my laptops used to very frequently tell me "This message could not be delivered" even though the person on the other end received it fine. (The problem went away after an OS reinstall.)
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