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If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

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Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

#181

Post by welterde »

Const-me wrote: post #144
welterde wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That feature of course needs support server-side, but Thunderbird does have a Sieve add-on (in case sieve is enabled/available on the server). I don't use it myself, since I prefer to edit the sieve filter file directly instead of using a GUI for it, but the option is there.

I prefer to right-click on e-mail and "create rule from message" from context menu. Also, the feature doesn't require any steps to configure, install or enable, it just works out of the box.

Unlike the Outlook+Exchange combination Sieve is an actual open standard (RFC 5228 & RFC 5804 & co) though that can be implemented by all mail servers and mail clients. Or is the Outlook+Exchange feature based on the same?

Looking at the sieve website it seems quite a few desktop and web mail clients do have support for it either out of the box or as an add-on. So I would say that having this functionality is more on the "common" side than "borderline unique".

Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

#182

Post by tehjoker »

ryandrake wrote: post #175
thesuitonym wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The obvious solution here is to not merge the whole thread into your email, instead including only the parts of the message that are directly relevant.

I’d like to see email clients offer a nice one-click “rebase on top of latest” button.

Dang. I never thought of email like that, but I wonder if email+git+UI would help for complex conversations.

Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

#183

Post by gregmac »

jayd16 wrote: post #138
gregmac wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone told me "that is documented in the chat channel, just search", my response would be "ok. So it's not documented." Even with the best organization (old content deleted), I don't want to wade through the conversations about it or all the other noise. Chat is temporal, the discussion about something like "should x be updated" is immediately irrelevant after the decision is made.

And email solves that? Or you are suggesting both chat and email do not solve the issue?

Yes, I'm saying neither chat nor email solve this issue.

Email is far worse, in fact, because:

* Everyone has a unique view

* Unless there are lots of cc-everyone style emails, you might not even have anything to find. (And cc-everyone sucks for 100 other reasons.)

* You can't find anything predating the start of your employment

The biggest issue with searching both chat and email is the absence of a result doesn't help: it's possible it was a private chat, or an email chain that you weren't a part of, but there's no way to tell.

(Side note: A very locked-down wiki isn't any better, but that's a conscious decision rather than default.)

Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

#184

Post by thesuitonym »

tabbott wrote: post #139
legerdemain wrote: post #25

The problem with "trying it with my team for one sprint" is that I now need to have a long conversation with legal. How will the service provider handle the content (discussions, screenshots, code snippets) that my team will upload? Do our current customer contracts contain any clauses that complicate the use of external discussion sites? In the unlikely event that the service offers the option to host it locally --…

Slack and all its clones are based on the chat room model, which structurally has the problem described in this article (and many others for productivity, such as wasting attention). Fundamentally, the chatroom model pioneered by IRC is poor for asynchronous communication because you can't sustain temporally overlapping conversations in a channel. However, you can't "just use email" -- Email's threading model is grea…

I get that you're just trying to get your software out there, but your modern features that email doesn't support are just wrong.

>shared history Not if you have a mailing list, and then going off the record is as easy as removing the mailing list from the CC field.

>markdown formatting This is an implementation failure, not really a fundamental problem with email. There is no reason that email clients don't support markdown, except that nobody has ever wanted it. There was someone who made a utility to switch markdown to regular MIME email, but just as a proof of concept. It works.

>Image previews I assume what you mean by this is an inline thumbnail that expands when you click on it? Again, there's nothing about email that prevents it, it's just the way email clients are. That could be fixed

>emoji reactions Okay, that's fair, there's no way to do this in email, short of sending a single emoji back. On the other hand, I think everyone would agree that this is more of a nice to have feature, than a necessary one, and one that really only makes sense in the world of quick, back and forth chat programs.

[1] https://begriffs.com/posts/2020-07-16-generating-mime-email....

Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

#185

Post by gregmac »

bluGill wrote: post #122
gregmac wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone told me "that is documented in the chat channel, just search", my response would be "ok. So it's not documented." Even with the best organization (old content deleted), I don't want to wade through the conversations about it or all the other noise. Chat is temporal, the discussion about something like "should x be updated" is immediately irrelevant after the decision is made.

Your point is valid, but not exactly correct. I don't want to know just what was decided, but why. Often I will come back to "should x be updated" again and again. Knowing the factors in the last decision is very important. More than once I've pushed to update x and had someone say "we can't for good reasons that I forget". Often I've spent weeks redoing the discussion before someone remembers/discovers why we can't…

While I fully agree about the need to record reasoning, my approach is to summarize and put it in either wiki or a ticket. Future me doesn't want to read a long chat or email thread (whether it was one I was involved with or not), and I assume no one else does either.

Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

#186

Post by SulfurHexaFluri »

a-dub wrote: post #73
jrockway wrote: post #51

I have always thought that Slack is designed to make information go away, and that's why people like it. Email never goes away unless you archive the thread. If you have a bunch of things that are going on, you open your inbox and realize just how behind you are, every time you open it. Slack, conversely, scrolls up and always looks the same. If you miss something, the world moved on without your input, and you feel…

amusingly, my understanding is that the original goal for slack was to be an archive. slack originally stood for: searchable log of all communication and knowledge but then in practice, i saw message retention locked down to 30 days or less, which kinda defeated the point. other modern tools, like trello, also seemed to have gaps when it came to logging/searching/archiving what happened. trello is fantastic for organ…

Doesn't slack have full history if you pay for it? We use Teams and I regularly find myself searching for stuff I remember I was sent months ago.

Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

#187

Post by pcthrowaway »

ogre_codes wrote: post #106
GekkePrutser wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, a real paid slack instance doesn't go away. All the public free slacks do.. The whole fact that Slack charges a lot for the privilege of keeping history beyond a couple of months, proves that it's worth a lot to many people.

Yes, but as gmail has illustrated, that just shifts the problem. Where before your problem was "It got deleted". Now the problem is search pulls up too many things. Slack seems to be even worse because unlike email, you don't really have subjects or thread beginnings, just continual flow of chatter.

You can make threads in slack. The implementation is a bit weird but (as of last time I used it circa 2018) it did the job sufficiently. For features which required more focused discussion from a sub-team over a longer period of time there was a pseudo-room feature (I don't remember what it's called though)

Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

#188

Post by astrobe_ »

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #35
legerdemain wrote: post #25

The problem with "trying it with my team for one sprint" is that I now need to have a long conversation with legal. How will the service provider handle the content (discussions, screenshots, code snippets) that my team will upload? Do our current customer contracts contain any clauses that complicate the use of external discussion sites? In the unlikely event that the service offers the option to host it locally --…

> The real answer is: just fucking use email. I know of at least one large company that forcibly deletes emails older than N months, as part of their legal retention policy. (I'm assuming it means non-retention to limit exposure to lawsuits.) That would be problematic for persistent documentation.

If they do store persistent documentation in emails, the problem lies somewhere between the chair and the keyboard.

Actually, forced deletion - if users are aware of it of course - is likely to sanitize everyone's practice. Email ain't a backup tool.

That's symptomatic of people doing the most silly things and then blame the failures on their tools.

Re: If it will matter after today, don't talk about it in a chat room

#190

Post by pseudalopex »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #108
fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the difference between that sort of topics and news groups or mailing lists (with archives)? If I want information on something, subscribe; if I don’t want information, unsubscribe: I can always follow/search the archive (or read digests)

The archive on NNTP is a first-class artifact that you can interact with in your newsreader via NNTP. You can do things like reply to old threads. The archive on a mailing list is a second-class artifact, typically hosted via HTTP, and usually people don't care about the quality of the archive's UX. The structural organization on NNTP is also a first-class artifact that everyone can refer to. A mailing list will go s…

IMAP and Exchange support archives and subscriptions.
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