Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A lingering farewell to the username

api.slack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 94 posts

Re: A lingering farewell to the username

#41

Post by roblabla »

DougWebb wrote: post #38
adekok wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many email systems support username variants. If you have "username@gmail.com", you can do: username+organization@gmail.com as your slack login. I do this all of the time. Why remember things when you can have a formula to determine which username to use?

Most of the time when I try that, the site's form validation complains that + is not a valid character. Very annoying. I think most of the time it's due to an over-specific whitelist, and sometimes it's due to url-escaping turning + into a space. Or maybe there's a regex and someone doesn't know how to escape literal + characters.

Yeah, I had that problem with some US govt website when applying for ESTA. I have since fixed the problem : My email is *@roblab.la, and I just put whatever the org's name as the username part of my email. So far it has worked basically everywhere, except on aliexpress, where they disallow aliexpress@EMAIL_DOMAIN. Probably to avoid people posing as staff >_>'.

Re: A lingering farewell to the username

#42

Post by lsaferite »

jfoutz wrote: post #17
ToJans wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't help but notice that slack is starting to get "enterprise" (threaded comments, this username thingy, ... ). They seem to be introducing a lot of complexity for all of the users, while only some of them would benefit from these new features. I'm hoping that they start realizing this, and keep simple chat the default, while allowing you to opt-in for all these "handy" features...

At least the client is lightweight, using hardly any memory, disk, or CPU.

I just about fell out of my chair just now from laughing. Thanks. Now people are staring at me.

Re: A lingering farewell to the username

#43

Post by benrbray »

xlii wrote: post #27
StavrosK wrote: post #22

Slack's authentication flow is the dumbest I've ever had the misfortune of using. I'm a member of multiple Slack organizations, and it needs one login per organization . I can't just have a single email address and join whatever org I want, I have to remember which email address I used for each one, otherwise I can't log in! I have multiple email addresses and don't use a specific one every time, so I have managed to…

Have you tried using password manager? The one I'm using has capability to store multiple logins for the same site with easily-searchable notes (i.e. Displayed in pop up when on site). For some sites I have like 20 sets of credentials and I never had a problem with keeping up with them.

Password managers don't help when you need to log in to a computer you don't own, e.g. a public computer at a library or office. Using password managers just makes it easier to lock yourself out when you need access most.

Re: A lingering farewell to the username

#44

Post by octalmage »

benrbray wrote: post #43
xlii wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried using password manager? The one I'm using has capability to store multiple logins for the same site with easily-searchable notes (i.e. Displayed in pop up when on site). For some sites I have like 20 sets of credentials and I never had a problem with keeping up with them.

Password managers don't help when you need to log in to a computer you don't own, e.g. a public computer at a library or office. Using password managers just makes it easier to lock yourself out when you need access most.

You've got web interfaces and mobile apps. I use 1password and don't have this problem.

Re: A lingering farewell to the username

#45

Post by benrbray »

abtinf wrote: post #36
StavrosK wrote: post #22

Slack's authentication flow is the dumbest I've ever had the misfortune of using. I'm a member of multiple Slack organizations, and it needs one login per organization . I can't just have a single email address and join whatever org I want, I have to remember which email address I used for each one, otherwise I can't log in! I have multiple email addresses and don't use a specific one every time, so I have managed to…

I am in a number of different slack orgs. With one email address, I join whatever org I want. > I have multiple email addresses and don't use a specific one every time... I just can't remember which email address I [use] I think I see the problem. I'm not sure how this approach allows you to function on the internet at all.

I have had a personal email, two school emails (undergrad + grad), and three work emails (internships). Most of the Slack orgs I'm a part of restrict access to emails from a specific domain (@university.edu, @company.com), so each account is associated with at least one Slack org. It's a mess, and it's because of poor design by Slack. I should have a "master" Slack account where I can list all the email addresses that I own, giving me access to all the associated orgs.

Re: A lingering farewell to the username

#46

Post by octalmage »

daxelrod wrote: post #31
daenney wrote: post #13

When this started rolling out it caused havoc for us. Without any warning that this was happening half of the people in our org got their display_name set to their full name, and the other half got their handle. For no apparent reason. Within the technology parts of our org everyone knows each other by handle, and we still let people pick their own handle when they join. It's even pretty common to only know people by…

See https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/205240127-mention-a... for a description of the UI for atting a duplicate display name.

I think I like the way HipChat does it better. @ing is suppose to be quick, if you have to click on a dialog every time you want to message someone that's going to slow you down. Hipchat just doesn't allow duplicate display names.

Re: A lingering farewell to the username

#47

Post by octalmage »

hownottowrite wrote: post #32

Sad to see this go... We use @username from external systems that feed into Slack. For example, putting a comment on a Zendesk ticket using @username alerts a person who would normally never pop into Zendesk to have a look.

That's a really cool feature! We could really use that!

Re: A lingering farewell to the username

#48

Post by eugeniub »

barnabee wrote: post #19

I think they're missing the point, Twitter got the display name / username dichotomy right: Display Name: what everyone sees next to your username, no guarantees that you don't change it every 5 minutes though... username: something short you choose and change rarely, can be cool, memorable, fun, and quite creative, always unique [Real Name: who cares, often necessary for work tools even though email ought to be enou…

Twitter has some problems too. People do change their username, and every time they do, all previous tweets mentioning them by @username lead to dead ends.

Re: A lingering farewell to the username

#49

Post by brandon272 »

octalmage wrote: post #44
benrbray wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Password managers don't help when you need to log in to a computer you don't own, e.g. a public computer at a library or office. Using password managers just makes it easier to lock yourself out when you need access most.

You've got web interfaces and mobile apps. I use 1password and don't have this problem.

I have no interest in logging into a password manager web interface on a public PC. (But that's just me.)

Re: A lingering farewell to the username

#50

Post by AndrewKemendo »

abtinf wrote: post #36
StavrosK wrote: post #22

Slack's authentication flow is the dumbest I've ever had the misfortune of using. I'm a member of multiple Slack organizations, and it needs one login per organization . I can't just have a single email address and join whatever org I want, I have to remember which email address I used for each one, otherwise I can't log in! I have multiple email addresses and don't use a specific one every time, so I have managed to…

I am in a number of different slack orgs. With one email address, I join whatever org I want. > I have multiple email addresses and don't use a specific one every time... I just can't remember which email address I [use] I think I see the problem. I'm not sure how this approach allows you to function on the internet at all.

That's great as long as whomever is inviting you doesn't have password requirements (aka no gmail etc...) which some of them do.

For example I have three slack channels: 1. Our Company 2. 500 Startups 3. The information

Each had different requirements so they all needed a different handle - even if I was using the same email.

It should be Single Sign On.

Post reply on HN