331–340 of 370 posts
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> Slack is trash and hostile to users It seems better than Skype and Hipchat and whatever Google's latest chat app.
But how about Matrix, Rocket.Chat, Mattermost, IRC, and other open source chat servers?
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And yet, slack has seen exponential growth, while IRC was always available but rarely used. We have seen this before and we will see it again. If OSS wants to be widely used, it needs to take UI seriously, and not dismiss it as frivolous “eye-candy”. It’s ok so say ‘no, we are fine within our niche’. But then you don’t get to arrogantly explain to them how they are “taking one step forward, two back” by not embarking…
To be fair, it is "frivolous eye-candy”. But that doesnt change the fact that you are not going to reach the people which rank eye candy higher then functionality.
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Are there really no good open source forum alternatives? -- asking for a friend :-)
We already use an open source forum: discourse. If you mean real-time chat, in my personal opinion, Discord is the best choice. Zulip is good, if you can deal with it being a bit weird. The other options are fine, but not great. You may have different opinions than me personally.
I don't understand what moving to slack is going to give them, which is inevitably where this is going to lead (or a similar web-based chat). IRC has the same tools for banning users as Slack, if not more powerful as you can ban ranges etc. You can require people to register with an email in the same way slack does, although I'd argue being anonymous and being able to talk without an account is one of IRC's best feat…
IRC isn't really anonymous or private. Your IP address is visible to everyone by default.
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Why do people use chat services? They want responses . Getting responses is what Slack and Discord are optimized for and why they've gained adoption. The chat services enable responses, by making it low friction, by giving the feel of being informal and real-time in a way that email and forums don't. They also enable asynchronous responses by being persistent, that your message won't go lost and unseen by a moment wi…
Out of curiosity, when you log into slack/discord in the morning, do you scroll back through the log to see if there are any unanswered questions that you can answer?
I scroll back and check for reported bugs and any problems people had that weren't resolved by others.
"They should just ask on a forum/github/stackoverflow" you might say. Ok, but they won't, they'll just stop using my library instead.
Forums require too much risk. Spend 20 minutes crafting a question, never get a response. Github and Stackoverflow are far too complicated for the average user. What's an issue? What's a template? What's a minimal reproducible example? They just want to know what error code 501 means...
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> straw-man argument Not at all a strawman argument. As I stated, there are a plethora of features in Slack, Discord, and its ilk that are most assuredly not "having fun while pretending to communicate". The whole point of my post is that one cannot so off-handedly dismiss an entire class of application. If GP meant to be dismissive of GIFs and emoji, they can easily have said so. (That said, one can post standard Un…
> If GP meant to be dismissive of GIFs and emoji, they can easily have said so. (That said, one can post standard Unicode emoji to IRC, and will anybody call that frivolous?) OP confirms. But that's the tip of the iceberg. Yes, you can use Unicode in IRC, and yes, people will kick you out if you "misuse" it - but perhaps I've been on weird channels. > incorrectly-entered Markdown formatting, or other kinds of minor r…
Forums are a totally different medium and I'm not interested in them at all these days. In the Korean discord I'm in, I can ask a question and get a response very promptly because it's just a chat. Sometimes this leads to questions being repeated, but I'll take that over a traditional forum any day.
Slack gifs ARE annoying, I don't see how they're not. Discord emoji is fine. Anyway, my point was that the comment I replied to constructed a strawman. When IRC people criticize slack or discord (or call them "frivolous"), it's not because of quality of life improvements like chat history, ease of use, etc.
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You can track logs if you want. It's up to the channel owner. Once you have that set up you won't miss anything, and people new to the channel could view previous history. You could also connect remotely through a server that never reboots too and log things yourself (as a client). I find Slack to be even worse in that regard because they'll purge your history after 10,000 lines unless you pay, but the payment scheme…
First off, the history is NOT purged. It's just not searchable beyond 10,000 messages. Pay for a month (if you can afford it!) and you'll see the entire history available. Further, the cost is $6.67/month -- substantially less that $15. I'm not fan of Slack for large communities but, seriously, let's stick to facts when discussing the pros and cons.
I'm a part of Slack for some large communities (not by choice but because it's where the organization wants to be), and every few months all of my private message history disappears and it tells me something about upgrading. It's not searchable, but it's also not in the back log either. It's 100% removed from the UI.
To me, that's not a good user experience, where you wake up one day and all of your important chat history is unavailable. It's even worse that it's still available but behind a paywall. So they hold your data hostage unless you pay that 1 month of fees. It's not about not being able to afford it. If you have a large community with 8,000 people, are you really going to spend $53,000+ to get your private messages which you only have access to for 1 month? Not even big companies with 100 million of funding have the paid plan. It might as well be purged even though technically it's not.
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My chat logs are just plain text under ~/.weechat/logs and I search them using rip-grep. Works really fast. I am guessing a nicer interface like IRCCloud or TheLounge can work like Slack for searching, file/snippet hosting etc in a more approachable manner.
So, you come to a new job and join a channel that has been around for 2 years. Design decisions and discussions from 4 months ago with the old tech lead are there. Does weechat give you access to those logs?
In other words, yes, in any reasonable environment you would have access to everything ever said in any logged channel.
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The issue is that zapzupnz deletions to propagate. This can only be ensured in locked-down systems. There's a difference between offering corrections and retractions that others may or may not accept and actually enforcing deletions. This is both socially and information-theoretically true.
All I said is that the deletions should be propagated. The presentation of this can only be ensured in locked-down systems, but the actual propagation is simple enough. Just as the server can send all users within a channel "so-and-so said this message", it can say "so-and-so deleted this message" — it can be left up to the client whether to actually remove it or perhaps just hide it, ready to be shown again with a c…