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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

#71

Post by harikb »

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.

One cannot search channels one is not part of. Don't forget channels. Not everything happens on #general and #random.

Also, even if I am part of the channel, there is no way I can search and locate what I want without knowing the right keyword to search for. Sure, the information is all there, but that only ads to the frustration. Search interfaces in Slack & all are very limited / too broad.

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

#72

Post by GekkePrutser »

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…

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.

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

#73

Post by a-dub »

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 organizing "what needs do", "who do", and "when done"... but in my experience is pretty terrible for "what happened" and "why". this is fine i think at smaller scales, but once complexity starts to scale up, it can be a nightmare. it's hard enough fighting issue hysteresis (reoccurring issues and bugs that drag on for years) when there's good historical views and explanations.

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

#74

Post by oasisbob »

munchbunny wrote: post #49
DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That sounds like a pathological case. How many companies actually do that?

Many, at least in the US. It's not just companies, government agencies also have similar needs due to sunshine and open-access laws.

The alternative to having a document retention policy is to just have employees delete things in an arbitrary manner. It's not just CYA for leaving inconvenient doc lying around, it's also to ensure the proper retention in the event of a preservation order or public records request.

Some companies go way further than others. One place I worked included "notes of a personal nature (eg, birthday cards)" in the retention policy and let us keep them for a week or two before destruction.

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

#75

Post by [deleted] »

legerdemain wrote: post #54
DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm willing to bet money that for every company that deletes emails older than some age also deletes Slack messages, and deletes then sooner . I speak as someone who worked for a company where email got archived and then deleted after 6 months, and currently works at a company where everyone only uses Slack, and Slack is purged after 30 days.

[deleted]

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

#76

Post by baxtr »

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 --…

I just love well thought out emails. They can provide a lot clarity and be the basis for great discussions.

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

#77

Post by GekkePrutser »

fractionalhare wrote: post #58
throw14082020 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I'm surprised if that's actually true. I would guess that most peoples' personal and work email accounts are managed through providers like Google or Microsoft, which do enforce all of those security protocols.

Their business products definitely don't enforce S/MIME by default (which is prohibitively difficult with external contacts anyway), and they recommend to set up the things like SPF and DKIM. They usually don't host your DNS so they can't do it for you (though they do tell you exactly what to set and provide a checker to see if you did it right!)

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

#78

Post by relaytheurgency »

I definitely agree with this. The one thing that I hoped would prove useful from these programs vs IRC was the idea of a persistent, searchable, history. However my experience has been not great. Searching history often just brings up unrelated snippets of conversations I didn't have any interst in, in channels I never chatted in. It's just more clutter.

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

#79

Post by flerchin »

legerdemain wrote: post #69
flerchin wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our email has a 90 day retention window, and Slack is permanent. We're the largest in our industry.

Cool! Where should I send bet money?

Mozilla or EFF, your choice. :-D

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

#80

Post by nobody9999 »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #40
emidln wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many organizations seem to use Outlook/Exchange and configure Exchange to make it difficult to use other mail clients (not enabling imap, not enabling caldav support so that a separate calendar and email client need to be used unless you use exchange, etc). Outlook is truly awful as a mail client and it would make one want to use anything else.

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.

>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.

Install Thunderbird[0] and use it for a week. You'll be able to tell the difference very quickly.

[0] https://www.thunderbird.net

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