After reading this I have but one request; please stop teaching people to code.
Your solution to a problem you have with some software is to suggest they simple throw engineers at it is sadly pathetic.
We Tried Slack and Regretted It
131–140 of 192 posts
Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
The slow demise of IRC is sad. Clients like WeeChat excel on the text side of things, but where's the knockout web, desktop and mobile client? Something with the UI of Gitter would go far. I always feel like IRC is a few protocol extensions and a few clients away from being relevant again. /me goes back to Freenode
I'm happy IRC is dying, because it's a giant attack surface. As a hosting provider sysadmin, dealing with IRC servers was among the absolute worst parts of my job -- mitigating DDoS attacks against them, extensive hacking attempts directed at their infrastructure and later, mine , when they couldn't get in, credit card fraud associated with the accounts, IRC networks designed specifically for command and control of b…
From my experience I haven't seen anything like this in the last few years. Botnets are controlled primarily from C&C web services or other SSL/TLS (+encrypted messages) transport via web.
The brute force ddos attacks I've seen are on illegal private server emulators and Minecraft et al. Maybe this is just a completely different experience by being in differnt part of internet.
Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
I authored this blog post. There is a lot of merit to your criticisms of my decision making. I want to point out that communities are increasingly using Slack, and many of them are also in the thousands of users. Slack does nothing to discourage this, aside from posting warnings about archiving messages. The real problem is that they have an undocumented user limit. Like I said, I'm pretty sure we're the first commun…
> So we have no alternative but to switch. It seems unlikely that all 5000 people are actively using their Slack account - if you started automatically deactivating accounts that haven't logged in after 3+ months (a pretty easy Cronjob using the API), you would most likely stay well south of the limits. You can always Email people with something to the effect of, "Hey! We've turned off your account, if you visit the…
They where only using slack for two months and hit the limit (of almost 9000).
Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It
#134I find it super weird that new chat and messaging applications keep finding popularity.
It seems like most of the features could be had by using a sufficiently featurefull IRC and email client.
hmm. That could be an interesting project. Implement a social network using nntp, using public-key cryptography (with tight integration in the client) for access control. But seriously, I can see how some features of social networks would be hard to implement with nntp and clients... but I'm kind of missing out on why most of the newer chat networks are better than IRC.
Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It
#135Here's the problem I have with this: 1. You have an organization (can't tell if for profit or non-for-profit) that explicitly states that it helps people "become a Software Engineer". 2. Yet, one of the organizers of the company (?) states "we blithely shepherded 300 to 500 new campers into our Slack every day, hopeful that this messaging company, now worth $2.8 billion, would hire more engineers to flog their LAMP s…
They even explicitly list the fact that Gitter uses Node.js as one of the advantage of them. I really hope they aren't teaching their students to pick third-party SaaS offerings based on whether or not they like the same tech as you do.
I saw that too, and I had to laugh. I like node.js, I use node.js, I've shipped large projects with node.js as part of the stack, and I'll very likely select node.js for elements of future projects. But...
...someone has been drinking way way waaaay too much of the koolaid. All it was missing was the phrase "web scale".
Edit: Heh. http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-tech-stack-behind-Slack/ans...
Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It
#136The one thing that has me mostly abandoning Gitter is that switching channels is incredibly slow on the browser. If Gitter had a standalone client, I'd be willing to give it another shot, but until then, I'm a proponent of using IRC & Slack.
Gitter does have standalone clients: https://gitter.im/apps
In my experience they're no better than the web view.
Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
I authored this blog post. There is a lot of merit to your criticisms of my decision making. I want to point out that communities are increasingly using Slack, and many of them are also in the thousands of users. Slack does nothing to discourage this, aside from posting warnings about archiving messages. The real problem is that they have an undocumented user limit. Like I said, I'm pretty sure we're the first commun…
> So we have no alternative but to switch. It seems unlikely that all 5000 people are actively using their Slack account - if you started automatically deactivating accounts that haven't logged in after 3+ months (a pretty easy Cronjob using the API), you would most likely stay well south of the limits. You can always Email people with something to the effect of, "Hey! We've turned off your account, if you visit the…
Yeah, but at the current growth rate, they would've easily hit 9000 active (logged in within 3 months) in less than a month
Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Do people really expect to receive full service and support for 8462 users for free? There are several service I can think of that have a large user base and support for free (github comes to mind). However, I have to play devil's advocate and say that even some paid services have horrible (or non-existent) support and service. > How can a company like Slack survive if it gives away resources like this? Perhaps wha…
> Perhaps what should have happened was that slack should have worked out a deal with this group to display advertising. If the quotes of their user base was correct - I'm sure any advertising group would drool over that kind of user presence. However, this could spin out of control with the wrong manager with dollar signs as their eyes. Why on earth would they waste time and effort on doing that? It's 100% clear wha…
> Why on earth would they waste time and effort on doing that?
Marketing? That's another stamp they can put on their list of users. Now look at what happened - instead of making slack look good now this blog post will show up showing how unprofessional they are.
> Why should they waste time and engineering effort on supporting massive non-teams when it is in no way their core focus?
If they can't handle an arbitrary number of users - then they shouldn't be advertising it. They are the ones offering as a free service and advertising it as "unlimited".
Don't get me wrong - unlimited is a ridiculous claim (I would never ever claim any service I offer is (publicly anyways) unlimited - and if we had a marketing department that made that claim they would all be fired) but for the majority of their users they probably only account for less than 1% of usage. It's the same game with shared hosting - 1000s of people on the same server but 99.9% of people only use 1% of resources.
> They don't say it's only for small teams—Slack does.
Their marketing is contradicting - they say "small teams" then they say
"There's also no limit on how many people you can add to your team on Slack."
and
"Slack is free to use for as long as you want and with an unlimited number of people."
So...which is it? (rhetorical question because any sane person signing up would assume unlimited number of users as it says right there in one sentence with no exceptions or asterisks).
Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except if you read the whole post, he ran into a previously undisclosed explicit user limit. The client was crashing. Slack ideally should warn you if you have too many users, before the point where the client crashes and the backend fails to send messages.
But who runs a chat with 5000+ users? The signal to noise would be insane. If each user posted 1 message per hour, that's 5000 messages per hour. For a group that size it seems like Twitter makes more sense. I can't imagine 5000 people needing real time communication. Kind of the mother of all edge cases for a team chat service.
It's usually 50-200 users online at a time, and out of that maybe 20-50 are chatting at least once a minute, so no, not 9000 users actively chatting at once.
Re: We Tried Slack and Regretted It
#140What a hyperbolic post. There is no reason to put a company on blast like this. There is a real team of people likely working exceptionally hard to operate Slack. You could have just written a post extolling the benefits of Gitter, and gone about your day of adding more campers to your project. I'm guessing Slack didn't beg for your business or community endorsements.
Slack is a 2.8B dollar company and not a small scrappy startup anymore. They can handle all the hate in the world and should not get a pass for sleazy behavior (the same is true for Microsoft, Google or Exxon). Not putting max number of users on website or in documentation is not fair to customers.