Slack Trial

The Slack "Experiment"

The Slack Trial has been a mixed bag in terms of reactions and I'd like to continue the discussion so here's a summary of some of the points that have been made.

I've laid it out in a good, bad, ugly table form to make it easier to digest, and I haven't duplicated info that's in the googlegroups thread

The Good	The Bad	The Ugly
Emoji	Emoji	Emoji
More userfriendly for non-techies	Can’t see who’s on the other side of the wall until they speak	Can’t tab-complete people on the other side of the wall
Documented API	It’s not IRC
Some scrollback, when entering you get a bit of context	Publicly logging IRC is seen by some as rude
Markdown formatting	When mirrored from Slack to IRC, markdown is not parsed by irc clients
Push notifications – without extra cost or tech	Default is to email on mention, auto-disables on install of mobile app, can be tweaked
	All Slack chat appears in IRC from the LHS_Slackbot
	File uploads inaccessible without account (images now being mirrored to imgur)
	It’s not possible for DMs to traverse IRC/Slack
	If you’re a freenode person, you want to be in IRC, it’s an inconvenience to be in Slack as well
Offline messages (Dms) – without extra cost or tech	Can't dm irc<->slack
Mobile client far better than any irc one
Uses web tech, so doesn’t get blocked as much	If it is blocked then you're screwed (vs using another irc server on the same net)
	Slack users don't see IRC status messages (maint warnings, netsplit, etc). Presumably the reverse also applies.

Where do we go from here?

I would like to see the Slack integration continue because I believe using slack will allow us to engage better with non-techies, and I don't think abandoning Freenode is a good idea.

I think we should frown upon the overuse of emoji, reactions and other slack-only features as it excludes those who prefer irc. The same goes for creating side-channels which could lead to more cliqueism than I'm comfortable with.

I think we should have the slack signup signposted on the website and listed as a way to contact us.

I would also welcome suggestions on how to make the LHS_Slackbot better, there are certain things like having IRC leave/join messages mirrored to slack that are disabled because I've made judgement calls on what's useful, but I can't guarantee my judgement is perfect!

Emoji is fun for some, irritating for others, and downright obnoxious to others, hence it's in all the columns!

The public archive has been disabled and the LHS_Slackbot has been modified to mirror images from Slack to Imgur so that IRC people can see them without a slack account. The bot also asks people uploading non-image files to consider IRC folks and upload them elsewhere.

<<Draft, I'm sure I've forgotten stuff>>