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 | Marvin won’t respond to commands from Slack without tweakage | |
| 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 | ||
| Mobile client far better than any irc one | ||
| Uses web tech, so doesn’t get blocked as much |
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!
<<Draft, I'm sure I've forgotten stuff>>