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Show HN: Use Slack for Everything

60 points by JCBarry 11y ago

bluetidepro 11y ago
I'm not sure if this service specifically requires full access permissions or not, but I do know a ton of these (awesome/neat) plugins like this popping up require a company to give the plugin full write/read permissions. And for that reason, it's stopped our company from being able to use them. I'd be curious to see how many companies would actually allow a 3rd party service to have that full amount of permissions. It's sort of like GitHub and how some services require the access to private repos. I'm not sure of a solution, but am just curious how it really holds back awesome services like this when companies don't feel comfortable giving it the level of access it has to have (but may not use that full access).
- lwhalen 11y ago
  Run an IRC server, configure a hubot. Yes, 'cloud'-based chat is pretty, but it's a new coat of paint over something that's been around for decades (IRC). For a company less than several thousand people, running your own singleton IRC server is about as complicated as setting up a basic 3-tier web application (i.e., a little fiddly, but not hard at all)
  - danpalmer 11y ago
    Clients on the other hand are somewhat lacking for IRC. We use Slack in a company of ~30, and while all the devs could easily use IRC, most of the rest of the company would struggle with it, and certainly wouldn't be able to communicate in the wide variety of ways (uploaded files, images/gifs, videos, code snippets, etc) that they do now. Slack is great at making all those rich media types 'just work', and while it was possible with plugins to some IRC clients, the UX was prohibitively bad in my experience.
    - lwhalen 11y ago
      That's a fair criticism. I know https://grove.io/ https://grove.io/ does great work in making 'real IRC' available to the masses, but it's still hosted. It would be nice if they would release their web-client as open source, or if someone wrote an OSS clone.
    - cballard 11y ago
      On one hand, you're completely right, on the other, I wish I could block all GIFs from Slack (or just not get notified about them). That kind of thing doesn't help me get work done, which is what I'm at work to do - not to share funny pictures.
      - thomastuts 11y ago
        That seems more like a Slack setup issue than an issue with Slack itself, to be honest. We have a separate #random channel for stuff like that and have turned off notifications for it. It's still there, but it's much less intrusive. You might also want to check out the settings in the Messages & Media section, specifically "Expand links to images, video and audio from external sources". That might help to disable the inline GIFs, although I haven't tried it myself.
      - danpalmer 11y ago
        Yeah of course, blocking gifs is entirely reasonable. However the rich media and ease of use is well worth the money to us. If we were a company of only developers then maybe IRC would suit us better.
    - wcummings 11y ago
      >Clients on the other hand are somewhat lacking for IRC. >(uploaded files, images/gifs, videos, code snippets, etc) Slack is really just a rich-text jabber client. "Use IRC" isn't a very strong suggestion for a business, what really gets me is seeing open source projects using slack. I even had a casual IRC channel I used to frequent migrate to slack, smh.
    - LinuxBender 11y ago
      Take a peek at convos (web IRC client frontend) https://github.com/Nordaaker/convos https://github.com/Nordaaker/convos for a persistent web client. It uses redis to maintain state.
  - oakesm9 11y ago
    Yes it's not too hard or too different, but have you ever tried getting non-developers to use IRC? Finding a desktop client is confusing (which one is best being the first question) and even basic setup can be daunting (servers, ports, channels etc). Slack, Hipchat and others however can be easily set up and used by pretty much anyone in a company. IRC is great for companies which only have very technically proficient employees, however that's not most companies...
    - Thlom 11y ago
      And without a bouncer your client must be always on to have any backlog. Mobile access sucks without a bouncer. Even with a bouncer it sucks for anyone not technical.
  - xena 11y ago
    Why not https://matrix.org https://matrix.org?
  - snuxoll 11y ago
    Compliance is an annoying issue with IRC. With Slack, Lync, or 99% of Jabber servers out there I can log every communication that takes place (outside of people using something like OTR with Jabber) - I can set up an IRC bot in every channel to log group chats, and maybe somehow disable private messages, but it's a pain in the butt to deal with IRC where compliance is a big deal (I work in healthcare). I've often toyed with the idea of writing an IRCD with logging built in that drops all CTCP setup messages, but it's a huge hassle.
    - f_ 11y ago
      Indeed compliance is an issue with IRC, but you don't need to write an IRCd to log all messages and you don't even need to configure IRC services: you could just use InspIRCd [1] (which, by the way, is a superb and extensible IRCd) and an extension such as [2] to achieve what you are looking for. [1] https://www.inspircd.org/ https://www.inspircd.org/ [2] https://github.com/joshenders/inspircd-m_chatlog https://github.com/joshenders/inspircd-m_chatlog
      - snuxoll 11y ago
        I'll have to give it some investigation. I'm pretty confident in the ability of end users to figure out a basic IRC client, but logging made it a non-starter for our use cases - the chatlog module you linked is rather basic, but looking at the source it should be easy to extend for our usage.
      - LinuxBender 11y ago
        UnrealIRCD also has modules for this. You have to contact the site admin to acquire them. https://www.unrealircd.org/ https://www.unrealircd.org/
- arihant 11y ago
  It's a slash command, should only need a webhook AFAIK.
- JCBarry 11y ago
  Hey there! This is a great point and something we recognized when developing operator. We wanted to make a service that didn't expose your entire chat to a third-party service. The OAuth scopes operator asks for are the following: chat:write:bot - so we can post to your channel operator's response. commands - to install the commands. users:read - so we can get a bit more information about you (name, team permissions, etc). We even toyed with the idea of eliminating the "users:read" to be as minimally invasive as possible.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
vineet7kumar 11y ago
There's a minor typo in the About section. It says "...We use Slack all the time wanted to...".
- JCBarry 11y ago
  Thanks!
  - nickjackson 11y ago
    Should also move your CSS include to the head.
d0m 11y ago
Looks like risky business to me since this is exactly what Slack is trying to do (Marketplace for commands)
- tarr11 11y ago
  Yeah, this already exists. Slack hasn't added many commands to their marketplace, but if this is at all successful, they will. Don't see how this lives as part of the Slack ecosystem. Maybe their goal is to become standalone.
  - Aloha 11y ago
    or they wont because it would add complexity to their product for features few customers need?
- bdcravens 11y ago
  Will we have the inevitable Twitter moment when Slack closes things up, and it becomes a crisis of unfairness for companies that built upon another?
  - kedean 11y ago
    I'm going to say yes. I thought it was common knowledge at this point not to base your entire service on the good will of another service? They're also banking on Slack not changing their API without telling them.
    - bdcravens 11y ago
      There were quite a few startups that built upon Twitter's API, and when access was taken away/limited, many pitch forks was raised here and elsewhere (to pretty much no effect)
zyxley 11y ago
FYI, on iPhone this shows up at maybe 2/3rds width of the screen with the rest as white space.
joemaller1 11y ago
What happened to the website icon fonts? They work in Chrome, but are giant Times New Roman text on Safari, both desktop and Mobile.
- joemaller1 11y ago
  Looks like they trusted Google's recommendation and used WOFF2 which doesn't work anywhere but Chrome and Firefox. - http://google.github.io/material-design-icons/#icon-font-for-the-web http://google.github.io/material-design-icons/#icon-font-for... - http://caniuse.com/#feat=woff2 http://caniuse.com/#feat=woff2
  - JCBarry 11y ago
    You nailed it! Fixed. :)
    - joemaller1 11y ago
      awesome :)
dominotw 11y ago
I've never used slack but how does it compare to hipchat's new connect api? https://developer.atlassian.com/blog/2015/12/going-way-beyond-slash-commands-with-uber-and-hipchat/ https://developer.atlassian.com/blog/2015/12/going-way-beyon...
- rrggrr 11y ago
  We left hipchat for slack for several reasons. First, we saved some money. There were more integrations for slack. The result has been mixed with my more technical users embracing slack, and my less technical users revolting. Hipchat is easier on the eyes and the UI is more intuitive. Both have a long way to go. There are too many chat clients around and far too many methods to communicate period. Aggregation is badly needed.
  - taurath 11y ago
    Aggregation is badly needed in the whole of technology, but big corporations have all decided that having proprietary cables, closed APIs and locked-in platforms is better for their bottom line than what would be good for the consumer. Also open source/free software advocates are pretty terrible at making cohesive user experiences. When it was AIM/YIM/MSN, etc, Trillian and Pidgin came in and made the experience usable. Now its Gchat, Telegram, Hipchat and Slack. Some of these have XMPP interfaces (all?) but frankly both companies will keep their APIs as closed as possible because they want to make money on their own platform.
  - nikolay 11y ago
    You saved money switching to Slack how?
davexunit 11y ago
Remember the time you could already do all of this with IRC?
- president 11y ago
  Pepperidge farm remembers
criddell 11y ago
This is neat, but I guess I don't really understand the problem this is solving. The company I work for uses Slack and I like it a lot. However, I've never found myself wishing that I could get a stock quote (or do a trade!), map an address, or play hangman there. Similarly, I think I could do a lot of that stuff from Emacs, but I never have. I use Emacs to edit text and I use Slack to chat. It might be because of the number of times I've been burned by plugins that break after I upgrade the host application, but I'm a little conservative when it comes to extensions and plugins. I tend to stick to default settings. The Slack instance we use has only one integration enabled - Giphy (animated gif responses). For the people here that are excited about this, is there a function in particular that is a killer function for you?
- ksenzee 11y ago
  The stock quote and hangman plugins are really just demos. Where services like this really shine is when you integrate them with your existing systems. Starting a Jenkins build from your Slack channel is pretty nifty.
  - nixgeek 11y ago
    But this would need setting up to interact with Jenkins? Assuming yes, at that point, why not just hop on over to the Slack App Directory and pick up something there? e.g. https://slack.com/apps/A0F7VRFKN-jenkins-ci https://slack.com/apps/A0F7VRFKN-jenkins-ci
  - pmlnr 11y ago
    Welcome to the world of IRC bots.
lordnacho 11y ago
Heh, can I use this as my bash shell? It would actually be useful to have my bash on one of my VMs in a chatroom where I can discuss things with a colleague.
fourstar 11y ago
No way in hell this specifically will take off. Slack will integrate this eventually (given their new App marketplace).
sgibat 11y ago
why limit this to slack? make it a general purpose text command workflow. terminals, email, anything.
mcantelon 11y ago
Slack mania reminds me of Twitter mania before Twitter decided to throw out the sharecroppers.

60 points by JCBarry 11y ago

I'm not sure if this service specifically requires full access permissions or not, but I do know a ton of these (awesome/neat) plugins like this popping up require a company to give the plugin full write/read permissions. And for that reason, it's stopped our company from being able to use them. I'd be curious to see how many companies would actually allow a 3rd party service to have that full amount of permissions. It's sort of like GitHub and how some services require the access to private repos. I'm not sure of a solution, but am just curious how it really holds back awesome services like this when companies don't feel comfortable giving it the level of access it has to have (but may not use that full access).

lwhalen 11y ago
Run an IRC server, configure a hubot. Yes, 'cloud'-based chat is pretty, but it's a new coat of paint over something that's been around for decades (IRC). For a company less than several thousand people, running your own singleton IRC server is about as complicated as setting up a basic 3-tier web application (i.e., a little fiddly, but not hard at all)
- danpalmer 11y ago
  Clients on the other hand are somewhat lacking for IRC. We use Slack in a company of ~30, and while all the devs could easily use IRC, most of the rest of the company would struggle with it, and certainly wouldn't be able to communicate in the wide variety of ways (uploaded files, images/gifs, videos, code snippets, etc) that they do now. Slack is great at making all those rich media types 'just work', and while it was possible with plugins to some IRC clients, the UX was prohibitively bad in my experience.
  - lwhalen 11y ago
    That's a fair criticism. I know https://grove.io/ https://grove.io/ does great work in making 'real IRC' available to the masses, but it's still hosted. It would be nice if they would release their web-client as open source, or if someone wrote an OSS clone.
  - cballard 11y ago
    On one hand, you're completely right, on the other, I wish I could block all GIFs from Slack (or just not get notified about them). That kind of thing doesn't help me get work done, which is what I'm at work to do - not to share funny pictures.
    - thomastuts 11y ago
      That seems more like a Slack setup issue than an issue with Slack itself, to be honest. We have a separate #random channel for stuff like that and have turned off notifications for it. It's still there, but it's much less intrusive. You might also want to check out the settings in the Messages & Media section, specifically "Expand links to images, video and audio from external sources". That might help to disable the inline GIFs, although I haven't tried it myself.
    - danpalmer 11y ago
      Yeah of course, blocking gifs is entirely reasonable. However the rich media and ease of use is well worth the money to us. If we were a company of only developers then maybe IRC would suit us better.
  - wcummings 11y ago
    >Clients on the other hand are somewhat lacking for IRC. >(uploaded files, images/gifs, videos, code snippets, etc) Slack is really just a rich-text jabber client. "Use IRC" isn't a very strong suggestion for a business, what really gets me is seeing open source projects using slack. I even had a casual IRC channel I used to frequent migrate to slack, smh.
  - LinuxBender 11y ago
    Take a peek at convos (web IRC client frontend) https://github.com/Nordaaker/convos https://github.com/Nordaaker/convos for a persistent web client. It uses redis to maintain state.
- oakesm9 11y ago
  Yes it's not too hard or too different, but have you ever tried getting non-developers to use IRC? Finding a desktop client is confusing (which one is best being the first question) and even basic setup can be daunting (servers, ports, channels etc). Slack, Hipchat and others however can be easily set up and used by pretty much anyone in a company. IRC is great for companies which only have very technically proficient employees, however that's not most companies...
  - Thlom 11y ago
    And without a bouncer your client must be always on to have any backlog. Mobile access sucks without a bouncer. Even with a bouncer it sucks for anyone not technical.
- xena 11y ago
  Why not https://matrix.org https://matrix.org?
- snuxoll 11y ago
  Compliance is an annoying issue with IRC. With Slack, Lync, or 99% of Jabber servers out there I can log every communication that takes place (outside of people using something like OTR with Jabber) - I can set up an IRC bot in every channel to log group chats, and maybe somehow disable private messages, but it's a pain in the butt to deal with IRC where compliance is a big deal (I work in healthcare). I've often toyed with the idea of writing an IRCD with logging built in that drops all CTCP setup messages, but it's a huge hassle.
  - f_ 11y ago
    Indeed compliance is an issue with IRC, but you don't need to write an IRCd to log all messages and you don't even need to configure IRC services: you could just use InspIRCd [1] (which, by the way, is a superb and extensible IRCd) and an extension such as [2] to achieve what you are looking for. [1] https://www.inspircd.org/ https://www.inspircd.org/ [2] https://github.com/joshenders/inspircd-m_chatlog https://github.com/joshenders/inspircd-m_chatlog
    - snuxoll 11y ago
      I'll have to give it some investigation. I'm pretty confident in the ability of end users to figure out a basic IRC client, but logging made it a non-starter for our use cases - the chatlog module you linked is rather basic, but looking at the source it should be easy to extend for our usage.
    - LinuxBender 11y ago
      UnrealIRCD also has modules for this. You have to contact the site admin to acquire them. https://www.unrealircd.org/ https://www.unrealircd.org/
arihant 11y ago
It's a slash command, should only need a webhook AFAIK.
JCBarry 11y ago
Hey there! This is a great point and something we recognized when developing operator. We wanted to make a service that didn't expose your entire chat to a third-party service. The OAuth scopes operator asks for are the following: chat:write:bot - so we can post to your channel operator's response. commands - to install the commands. users:read - so we can get a bit more information about you (name, team permissions, etc). We even toyed with the idea of eliminating the "users:read" to be as minimally invasive as possible.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

vineet7kumar 11y ago

There's a minor typo in the About section. It says "...We use Slack all the time wanted to...".

JCBarry 11y ago
Thanks!
- nickjackson 11y ago
  Should also move your CSS include to the head.

d0m 11y ago

Looks like risky business to me since this is exactly what Slack is trying to do (Marketplace for commands)

tarr11 11y ago
Yeah, this already exists. Slack hasn't added many commands to their marketplace, but if this is at all successful, they will. Don't see how this lives as part of the Slack ecosystem. Maybe their goal is to become standalone.
- Aloha 11y ago
  or they wont because it would add complexity to their product for features few customers need?
bdcravens 11y ago
Will we have the inevitable Twitter moment when Slack closes things up, and it becomes a crisis of unfairness for companies that built upon another?
- kedean 11y ago
  I'm going to say yes. I thought it was common knowledge at this point not to base your entire service on the good will of another service? They're also banking on Slack not changing their API without telling them.
  - bdcravens 11y ago
    There were quite a few startups that built upon Twitter's API, and when access was taken away/limited, many pitch forks was raised here and elsewhere (to pretty much no effect)

zyxley 11y ago

FYI, on iPhone this shows up at maybe 2/3rds width of the screen with the rest as white space.

joemaller1 11y ago

What happened to the website icon fonts? They work in Chrome, but are giant Times New Roman text on Safari, both desktop and Mobile.

joemaller1 11y ago
Looks like they trusted Google's recommendation and used WOFF2 which doesn't work anywhere but Chrome and Firefox. - http://google.github.io/material-design-icons/#icon-font-for-the-web http://google.github.io/material-design-icons/#icon-font-for... - http://caniuse.com/#feat=woff2 http://caniuse.com/#feat=woff2
- JCBarry 11y ago
  You nailed it! Fixed. :)
  - joemaller1 11y ago
    awesome :)

dominotw 11y ago

I've never used slack but how does it compare to hipchat's new connect api? https://developer.atlassian.com/blog/2015/12/going-way-beyond-slash-commands-with-uber-and-hipchat/ https://developer.atlassian.com/blog/2015/12/going-way-beyon...

rrggrr 11y ago
We left hipchat for slack for several reasons. First, we saved some money. There were more integrations for slack. The result has been mixed with my more technical users embracing slack, and my less technical users revolting. Hipchat is easier on the eyes and the UI is more intuitive. Both have a long way to go. There are too many chat clients around and far too many methods to communicate period. Aggregation is badly needed.
- taurath 11y ago
  Aggregation is badly needed in the whole of technology, but big corporations have all decided that having proprietary cables, closed APIs and locked-in platforms is better for their bottom line than what would be good for the consumer. Also open source/free software advocates are pretty terrible at making cohesive user experiences. When it was AIM/YIM/MSN, etc, Trillian and Pidgin came in and made the experience usable. Now its Gchat, Telegram, Hipchat and Slack. Some of these have XMPP interfaces (all?) but frankly both companies will keep their APIs as closed as possible because they want to make money on their own platform.
- nikolay 11y ago
  You saved money switching to Slack how?

davexunit 11y ago

Remember the time you could already do all of this with IRC?

president 11y ago
Pepperidge farm remembers

criddell 11y ago

This is neat, but I guess I don't really understand the problem this is solving. The company I work for uses Slack and I like it a lot. However, I've never found myself wishing that I could get a stock quote (or do a trade!), map an address, or play hangman there. Similarly, I think I could do a lot of that stuff from Emacs, but I never have. I use Emacs to edit text and I use Slack to chat. It might be because of the number of times I've been burned by plugins that break after I upgrade the host application, but I'm a little conservative when it comes to extensions and plugins. I tend to stick to default settings. The Slack instance we use has only one integration enabled - Giphy (animated gif responses). For the people here that are excited about this, is there a function in particular that is a killer function for you?

ksenzee 11y ago
The stock quote and hangman plugins are really just demos. Where services like this really shine is when you integrate them with your existing systems. Starting a Jenkins build from your Slack channel is pretty nifty.
- nixgeek 11y ago
  But this would need setting up to interact with Jenkins? Assuming yes, at that point, why not just hop on over to the Slack App Directory and pick up something there? e.g. https://slack.com/apps/A0F7VRFKN-jenkins-ci https://slack.com/apps/A0F7VRFKN-jenkins-ci
- pmlnr 11y ago
  Welcome to the world of IRC bots.

lordnacho 11y ago

Heh, can I use this as my bash shell? It would actually be useful to have my bash on one of my VMs in a chatroom where I can discuss things with a colleague.

fourstar 11y ago

No way in hell this specifically will take off. Slack will integrate this eventually (given their new App marketplace).

sgibat 11y ago

why limit this to slack? make it a general purpose text command workflow. terminals, email, anything.

mcantelon 11y ago

Slack mania reminds me of Twitter mania before Twitter decided to throw out the sharecroppers.