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Ask HN: Have you tried using forum software in place of Slack at work?

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Ask HN: Have you tried using forum software in place of Slack at work?

#1

Post by dmarlow »

The recent submission on Slack (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34540085) got me thinking about how using something like Discourse would look like. Having something like ChatGPT summarizing things as you go would also be useful. If you've done it, how did it go? Any interesting lessons learned?

Re: Ask HN: Have you tried using forum software in place of Slack at work?

#3

Post by tra3 »

Yeah, we use a (virtual?) private instance of stack overflow. Now I just have another "inbox" to check.

In the comments to the post you linked, someone mentioned funnelling their slack's @here or @username messages to their email inbox and processing them in arrival order. This made me realize what bothers me about me about slack the most -- it's the lack of customizability.

The only experience with slack you can have is what slack deems appropriate. Contrast that with email filtering. Even IRC with all it's quirks was infinitely more flexible.

Ultimately trying to keep up with everything that's being discussed on slack is impossible, but I sorely miss a workflow that allows me to specify what should be bubbled up..

Re: Ask HN: Have you tried using forum software in place of Slack at work?

#4

Post by dieselgate »

tra3 wrote: post #3

Yeah, we use a (virtual?) private instance of stack overflow. Now I just have another "inbox" to check. In the comments to the post you linked, someone mentioned funnelling their slack's @here or @username messages to their email inbox and processing them in arrival order. This made me realize what bothers me about me about slack the most -- it's the lack of customizability. The only experience with slack you can hav…

A tough part about slack is messages deletion after whatever time frame. Not sure what the pricing policies are but even the enterprise account I use for work deletes (private maybe?) messages, and separately the free tier do as well. (maybe the company is just cheap)

I'd personally not care too much if it's slack/forum like platform but my biggest request/need is message persistence - especially for professional/enterprise use

Edit: it's interesting to think about a private Overflow instance being used for work comms. - can't even really visualize how that'd work because i always navigate to stack overflow topics via search engine

Re: Ask HN: Have you tried using forum software in place of Slack at work?

#10

Post by sethammons »

cpach wrote: post #8

Fly does this and it seems to work well for them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30380570 At my workplace we have Slack, but not Discourse. We do have Confluence though, which works quite good for stuff that needs to be referenced in future.

My experience with Confluence is it only works if you have a link to the document. Search is utterly useless. The only search I've found worse is Google Docs. I can be in a meeting and search direct quotes or titles of documents being shared on screen and they will not come up in gdoc's search; I have to request a link every time. Even for documents I've previously opened.
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