Clojurians Log v2

Ah, the wonderful irony -- all that discussion that we've had here over the years about the transient nature of Slack and the possible alternatives, captured on Hackpad... which was taken over by Dropbox, and now we no longer have easy access to it! I guess that's a rather perfect commentary on the inertia that keeps us all on Slack 🙂

Where we… have no easy access to all our historical content?

I mean, I get the irony but at best Hackpad is now what Slack has always been.

I've never heard of HackPad before the folks who started the big "Slackopalypse" discussions used it to write everything down about the alternatives everyone was trying and the pros and cons of everything.

I guess no one should ever assume a free-to-use online service is in any way permanent...

No, that’s pretty clear.

Unless they get their money from somewhere obvious (e.g. Apple)

Basically any company which takes VC is going to be acquired or fold at some point, unless they go public (vanishingly unlikely in >99% cases)

I guess I just get frustrated when young folks come into the Clojurians Slack and then rail against the corporate software world -- since that's how we all make our money 🙂

I have no problem with the corporate software world, I just hate losing my messages.

And everyone else’s.

I really wish Slack would just let me pay $6/month for access to them, even if everyone else doesn’t want to.

That would be an interesting model -- I wonder how many folks here would actually pay? (vs how many say they'd pay)

The problem is probably access control, plus if I had easy access to all the data I could archive it off or sell it on demand 🙂

I can understand why a community is all or nothing for them, but… that would work for me.

I'm surprised they allow logbots in the first place, to be honest. I guess they consider that the data storage and searching is someone else's problem at that point...

I actually don’t think their TOS does allow it - certainly it didn’t previously.

Our logbot probably risks having the community shut down if the TOS doesn’t allow it.

> You may not use the Slack API to replicate or compete with core products or services offered by Slack.

I seem to recall another Slack community did some digging and a purely readonly searchable archive is not considered "competition"...

Surely it competes with the fact that a readonly searchable archive is essentially the only thing you pay for with Slack?

I mean, I haven’t researched it but I’d be very surprised by that - why would anyone pay if that were legit?

Sorry, was off having dinner... Well, IRC and a logbot and a searchable archive already exists and is free -- so Slack wouldn't have much of a leg to stand on trying to defend "non-compete" against that.

There's a lot about Slack that is either unique or at least packaged very differently -- and aimed at teams with permissions and team management and so on. That's the area that you would not be allowed to compete with based on their API.

The one feature you don’t see in typical IRC implementations is some way to retrieve channel history in the client (the equivalent of scrolling backwards in Gitter or Slack). In the age of laptops that means you’ll miss things whenever you flip the lid closed.

I found one service Grove (http://grove.io) that runs IRC servers with archives and search and a custom IRC /history command, but the pricing is roughly $2.50/user/month up to 50 users, and “call us!” for larger teams.

> Well, IRC and a logbot and a searchable archive already exists and is free -- so Slack wouldn’t have much of a leg to stand on trying to defend “non-compete” against that. The TOS doesn’t say you can’t compete with something else, it says you can’t compete with Slack.

@gonewest818 there was a service called http://irccloud.com that was a permanently connected IRC with scrollback for $5/month/connection (so per network you used) but it was a web app. Don't remember whether it was searchable. I used it for a while. It was free without the permanent connection.

It was a nice web client for IRC. I use Riot now, connected to IRC via Matrix. But I don't use IRC much -- nearly all the communities I care about are on Slack.

I also use Discord -- there is a small Clojure community there. Also on Gitter.

More people prefer Slack -- even tho' there is an extremely vocal minority that don't.

I use irccloud - it’s great!

I have a DigitalOcean VM I use as an IRC logger/bouncer. It also sits on the IRC gateway to a couple slacks including this one so I do have a fair chunk of logs but it only sees the channels I’m in. Not much came out of that hackpad work anyway AFAIK.

Thanks. I’m not at all against Slack, but I find myself already using a little bit of everything (Slack, IRC, Gitter, Discord, Google Chat, etc.) so it would be no big deal to me if Clojurians were to switch platforms. Gitter has free history, for example, and the UX is … good enough.

Yeah. But we have… what is it now 12.2k people here, not in gitter or #clojure@freenode

I thought hack padders decided to go build #braid-chat ?

For me slack is just what chat between several people is. Its not a tracking system, its not a history keeping system, its just a place to exchange with a short term memory. And whenever a colleague comes over to discuss a bug, the outcome is always to put it into our bug tracker or forget it. Thats the way slack should be used too. If something needs to be persistent, take it out of slack into whatever is appropriate. I use E-Mails for instance for keeping a record of private communication.

Also I think thats an advantage of it, imagine you would be able to remember every chat you had back into your early childhood, way to much information to keep 😄

@sveri Well, if you're on a paid plan -- like we have at work -- then the history and searchability can be pretty useful (often easier to search Slack's history than find pages on Confluence 🙂 ). I'm in about a dozen or so Slacks now -- only one of them is a paid plan and the free ones range from a thousand or so members up to around 15K (kotlinlang)... But I agree, for communities, I look at it as a fancy, ephemeral chat system -- if I see anything interesting, I can copy/paste it into OneNote or something, or add the shared link to my reading list, or whatever...

@seancorfield Good to know that its actually useful. OTOH, comparing it to confluence is kind of comparing a Ferrari to a Bycicle 😄 Confluence search results are so horrible, I just dont use it anymore and hope I visited the link already and trust my firefox search more.

@sveri lol https://www.google.com/search?q=colnago+ferrari&safe=off&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwihj-ikw4_ZAhUV02MKHUtiC4IQ_AUICygC&biw=1439&bih=776

(google image search for “colnago ferrari” which is a high end bicycle which is… a ferrrari)

oh wow, we have a new spammer

well, TIL ferrari has bycicles 😄