Slack is degraded. My team has fallen back to email. Is this irony?
Users may be unable to connect or experiencing degraded performance
121–130 of 225 posts
Re: Users may be unable to connect or experiencing degraded performance
#122Is Discord a viable alternative to Slack? If not, why not?
If you're question is it a viable alternative to Slack for business purposes, the answer is no. And it's not bc of anything related to the application itself but because of the insane TOS.
> By uploading, distributing, transmitting or otherwise using Your Content with the Service, you grant to us a perpetual, nonexclusive, transferable, royalty-free, sublicensable, and worldwide license to use, host, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display Your Content in connection with operating and providing the Service.
Re: Users may be unable to connect or experiencing degraded performance
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes it is, but a key feature discord lacks is threads. Still it is a huge upgrade from Slack in terms of performance and ease of use.
I am a heavy Slack user but I don't use threads. Threads seem like a confusing mess. Am I missing something not using Slack threads?
FWIW, I was also a threads nay-sayer but I've since seen the light
Remember the irc support channels where conversations and problem/solution dialogs were constantly muxed with other conversations / dialogs?
Imagine each question being a root message, and all of the dialog / suggestions / answers being in a thread. Also makes it super convenient for search.
In addition to that I find that beyond a certain channel / DM count it's a lot easier to follow up on things with threads
Give it a shot, try to get your whole team on board. You can always revert back to not using them later :)
Re: Users may be unable to connect or experiencing degraded performance
#124This 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.
The mismatch between expectation and clearly visible feedback is in the timing. It would be fine if there was a 'still sending' type message after 2 seconds. If this comes up too frequently then the connection is not as reliable as the UI is pretending it to be.
Re: Users may be unable to connect or experiencing degraded performance
#125Not a good time to be testing a slack bot :(
Never a better time to check your error conditions!
Re: Users may be unable to connect or experiencing degraded performance
#126This 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.
It's not an implementation detail, it's a whole (controversial) UX design pattern: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/11/true-lies-of-optimi...
I didn’t know it was that controversial. I feel like that article is making a bit of strawman argument from the get go by talking about 1-3% failure rate from the backend. If I had a system that flaky, I’d be taking a good hard look at myself before blaming anything on my optimistic UI :-)
There are other things to consider too. Like for example network failures vs backend failures. In the case of network failures you can actually notify users before they even try to take an action. So now you’re down to some diminishing case where your code is effectively wrong (maybe the client is too old), and again there are more elegant ways of handling that. Also, I bet you have the response back really quickly to make a call on it.
Having a worked on unstable networks I can say that there are parts of slack’s implementation that suck - like if you try to change a message that hasn’t synced yet, they get into broken states with the edit. But that’s not the fault of optimistic UI, it’s other technical choices at play.
I know you haven’t named a horse in this race, but I feel people hating on Slack for having an optimistic UI are a bit off base. Considering that I’ve sent (apparently) 2.5k slack messages in the last 30 days and I don’t recall any going wrong, I think they’ve got it right.
Re: Users may be unable to connect or experiencing degraded performance
#127Slack 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 saw the results immediately after I modified the files. I did not even have to refresh the page when I was making stuff with Vue.js.
Re: Users may be unable to connect or experiencing degraded performance
#128Dear Slack: Your service is down, it's not "slow performance". Be honest to your customers, or I will make sure our team switches to Microsoft Teams.
Their status page is annoying me more and more with these recent outages. Recalling the incidents in September, it's a bit cheeky they call that "99.93%" uptime (30 mins of downtime). Having remembered that there were at _least_ 2 seperate 1 hour+ incidents where I was struggling to send messages in Sept, I went through to look at the history, and they seem to have purposefully hidden these incidents on the calendar.…
If companies were honest, they would multiply downtime by the number of users at the time. Because of course, great uptime doesn't matter if it's only uptime when no one is using it in the middle of the night.
It's like when trains report 95% on time, except that the times when the service is delayed is when the trains are full. All the delays that actual people experience (person-hours) happen in that 5%.
Re: Users may be unable to connect or experiencing degraded performance
#129Dear Slack: Your service is down, it's not "slow performance". Be honest to your customers, or I will make sure our team switches to Microsoft Teams.
Are you suggesting Microsoft has a more accurate status page? Honest question, I have no experience with their cloud services.
Re: Users may be unable to connect or experiencing degraded performance
#130Is Discord a viable alternative to Slack? If not, why not?
if you’re looking just for an alternative chat option, check out sqwok.im, it’s sort of a mix of twitter and slack, in open beta