Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

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?

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.

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.

>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