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Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

(skyfall.dev)
1806 points JustSkyfall | 5 comments | 18 Sep 25 01:37 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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randyrand ◴[18 Sep 25 02:17 UTC] No.45284297[source]▶
Wow, Slack does not allow business customers to export their chats. WTF. Found this:

"Workspace Owners can apply for Corporate Export. This lets you export all messages (including DMs and private channels), but only if your company has legal or compliance requirements and Slack approves the request. Once approved, exports are scheduled and delivered automatically."

So they have the tech built, you just aren't allowed to use it. Who would use this piece of garbage?

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userbinator ◴[18 Sep 25 02:21 UTC] No.45284343[source]▶
IMHO "allow" is a rather moot term, when you already have access. Their API is surprisingly well-documented; when I worked at a place that used Slack, I had a logger hooked up to a local database, which was very useful when their not-quite-search failed to give any results for a comment that you and others very clearly remember making.
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edoceo ◴[18 Sep 25 02:38 UTC] No.45284530[source]▶
Yes. If you use Slack, make your own archive.

I, I just have to mention that IRC had these archives so repeat questions had a corpus to search. The walled gardens don't.

For my teams the "modern" solution is Mattermost. My (biased) feelings are that it's 10x better than free-slack and 100x better than paid.

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1. MontyCarloHall ◴[18 Sep 25 03:05 UTC] No.45284765[source]▶
>IRC had these archives so repeat questions had a corpus to search

It did? I used IRC pretty frequently back in the day, and the only logging I ever saw was through your own client. This was in the days of dialup, so you'd miss any conversations from when you weren't logged in. If you were fancy, you'd have a bouncer set up on an always-on remote server to log messages when you were away. But I never saw any centralized logging à la Slack/Teams/Mattermost. It's certainly not something supported by any IRCd I'm aware of. Maybe a few channels had custom bots that logged everything to a centrally searchable location, but I never saw such a thing.

Indeed, some here even tout the "ephemeral nature of IRC as a feature, not a bug." [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32000415

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2. skydhash ◴[18 Sep 25 03:23 UTC] No.45284905[source]▶
The ephemeral is indeed a bug. Anything important should be saved somewhere else (notes, decisions, docs, wiki,..) IRC is the same as watercooler or quick group meeting, no one brings a recorder to have everything on file.
3. edoceo ◴[18 Sep 25 04:51 UTC] No.45285554[source]▶
Friend, back in the day many email and IRC rooms were archived. I wave my hat to a thing called MARC. One used to use Google (pre-stackoverflow) and see threads from the OGs. And one could find the core-expert lurking. Sometimes you could make a personal connection.

I miss the old Internet.

And get off my lawn!

4. madaxe_again ◴[18 Sep 25 05:59 UTC] No.45285979[source]▶
You can just run bots. We had one who was responsible for archiving everything so it was searchable, and would allow you to search, another which would allow you to do deployments, and another which complained about severe errors in the critical environments.

I still don’t understand what slack can do that IRC and a few bots can’t.

5. userbinator ◴[18 Sep 25 06:15 UTC] No.45286105[source]▶
Plenty of communities kept IRC archives.

Here's Ubuntu: https://irclogs.ubuntu.com/