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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

#201

Post by swiley »

throw14082020 wrote: post #50
mumblemumble wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is really only one fundamental problem with email: its mechanism for managing who takes part in the conversation is all wrong for team communication. The symptoms of this problem are myriad: reply-all storms, cya-by-cc, replying to a 5 month old email rather than starting a new thread, fyi forwards, etc. Which isn't to say that all the advantages you list for email are not true. They are. It's just that most pe…

There are many problems with email, not just one. Sure, we have SPF, DKIM, DMARC and S/MIME, but they're not used by most people. Especially the most important one, S/MIME (to encrypt your messages/ keep them private).

Most things I've seen require/enforce S/MIME.

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

#202

Post by hbosch »

wpietri wrote: post #192

I find this somewhat incomprehensible. Why the bias for seeing and archiving everything? The implicit model, which is right there in his title, is "talk", which is not naturally archived. I've built products just fine using verbal communication nearly exclusively. [1] We don't need to create some sort of panoptic archive of every conversation ever had to get things done. If people miss things, they miss things. We ca…

> I find this somewhat incomprehensible. Why the bias for seeing and archiving everything? The implicit model, which is right there in his title, is "talk", which is not naturally archived.

Somewhat harder to do now that we are all WFH.

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

#203

Post by swiley »

ogre_codes wrote: post #61
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 --…

> just fucking use email. I get you. But also: - Email doesn't retain context very well. If I dig back through my email I might have all of the emails in a thread, or maybe not. - Likewise, I can't send someone a link to a previous emailed conversation so it makes for poor documentation. I can forward an individual email, but not the comment in context. - Email is not easy to index or post up for reference. You can't…

This is why most replies include quotes.

But yeah for groups you need a mailing list with an archive. It's still better than most IM apps IMO.

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

#204

Post by andybak »

julianlam wrote: post #148
andybak wrote: post #120

I can find useful discussions from 10 or 20 years ago because they were crawled and archived. IRC, Usenet, web message boards, mailing lists... Every single discussion happening on Slack or Discord will probably be lost in a year or two and is impossible to find unless you happen to be already aware of it. Developers should not use these platforms for anything with any value. This is not the way to share information.

The key here is not the format of communication, since you've listed email chains, chat, and forums in one list. It's the fact that slack and discord are essentially walled gardens that do not allow for third-party indexing. Therein lies the problem. If public discord servers were indexable you'd have no issue with it.

I would still have some issues. I do find IRC archives much, much less valuable than more structured sources.

But I'm picking my battles at this point in time. And the lack of indexing is the most critical flaw and one I think is immensely damaging to technical communities on those platforms.

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

#205

Post by swiley »

NationalPark wrote: post #34
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 --…

Email isn't searchable by people who weren't on the threads. In an org that uses IM well (they exist!) the chat system actually becomes sort of like a wiki, except a lot more helpful.

>the chat system actually becomes sort of like a wiki

That sounds horrible and very fragile.

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

#206

Post by Const-me »

welterde wrote: post #181
Const-me wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Or is the Outlook+Exchange feature based on the same?

Not sure but unlikely. It works in Exchange for 20 years now, that RFC was written in 2008.

> having this functionality is more on the "common" side than "borderline unique".

The complete UX makes it borderline unique. Available out of the box, has a nice GUI, and is reliable in practice.

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

#207

Post by Karunamon »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #63
mumblemumble wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is really only one fundamental problem with email: its mechanism for managing who takes part in the conversation is all wrong for team communication. The symptoms of this problem are myriad: reply-all storms, cya-by-cc, replying to a 5 month old email rather than starting a new thread, fyi forwards, etc. Which isn't to say that all the advantages you list for email are not true. They are. It's just that most pe…

Some of these are solved by things like a corporate NNTP server or mailing lists, right?

Some of them. In a previous job this was actually the solution my department ended up using - one box running Mailman, with various lists set up for things like special groups, people who need to receive alerts on specialized systems, stuff like that.

The big win was the ability to rapidly subscribe and unsubscribe from lists as you needed them. The actual corporate email distro lists were handled by a dedicated IT team who insisted on tickets for everything, so most people just added filter rules to their inboxes instead of dealing with that mess.

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

#208

Post by GordonS »

bluGill wrote: post #99
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really that bad? I'm just a dumb machine operator that uses Outlook at work, Fastmail for myself, and Gmail because I'm an idiot too, and really can't tell the difference.

Outlook takes to long to start up in the morning. If it could start instantly I'd walk into the conference room on-time, but instead I'm several minutes late. Now that I'm working from home it needs to get the chat client started instead, but the the end result is the same, if I'm not running early I'll be late to important early morning meetings. (my early morning meetings are with India, so they will quickly assume…

There is something very wrong with your Outlook and/or Exchange install if it takes "several minutes" to start.

I've used Outlook in several organisations over the years, and start time has always been in the order of 5-10s.

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

#209

Post by mbreese »

Communitivity wrote: post #130

I disagree with this article. This is what was said about GMail when it first came out - you need folders, without folders you can't keep organized, etc. Turns out indexing and mechanisms to make use of that indexing (labels, advanced sorts, filters) work better than folders. Persistent chat that can be labelled, indexed, searched and filtered is amazing for work related chats, or any chat that becomes part of a long…

I don't know about that. There are a few large differences between chat and email, so it's not a great comparison.

1) length -- most emails are significantly longer than any single chat message

2) context -- email threads are saved (and indexed) in the context of their thread.

With chat, you really don't get ether, so it's significantly more difficult. You can never really know what a message is a reply to. Responses can come fast or slow. Individual channels can have multiple conversations happening, if not simultaneously, then at least over time.

> as long as people use the tags

I mean, that's the difficulty with any system... getting people to use it. If your team can be disciplined about the tags, then I'm glad that works for you. I not sure it would work well in many other contexts.

I've tried a few different options over the years, from archiving/indexing IRC chat logs, to bug trackers, to wikis, to email, to Slack, to Notion, etc...

Almost anything can work if you're disciplined. My problem has always been getting the rest of the team on board.

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

#210

Post by ogre_codes »

swiley wrote: post #203
ogre_codes wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just fucking use email. I get you. But also: - Email doesn't retain context very well. If I dig back through my email I might have all of the emails in a thread, or maybe not. - Likewise, I can't send someone a link to a previous emailed conversation so it makes for poor documentation. I can forward an individual email, but not the comment in context. - Email is not easy to index or post up for reference. You can't…

This is why most replies include quotes. But yeah for groups you need a mailing list with an archive. It's still better than most IM apps IMO.

Yes, but quotes are pretty limited in usefulness, particularly since different clients quote email differently and threads can get shredded quickly.

> It's still better than most IM apps IMO.

Yes, but you are trading one set of limits for another.

It's a bit surprising that at this point we haven't standardized on something better than essentially IRC versus email.

(Ok not surprising, frustrating)

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