10 ms·

Here's my best practices list: 1. The best use of slack is the free edition which has limited history. Once this lack of history is made clear, people use it s

by educar 10y ago

Here's my best practices list: 1. The best use of slack is the free edition which has limited history. Once this lack of history is made clear, people use it simply for online pings. Since notes, files and everything will disappear, people will automatically put the effort to put those things in the right tools (wiki, bug tracker etc). 2. Don't expect people to be online. It's the same as irc. If people are there, they are expecting to be interrupted / they are feeling helpful at that moment. 3. Integrations.. are a gimmick. There is really no value in knowing someone commented on some github issue instantly. Or someone committed something. Use integrations only for firefighting. But because of 2) use this carefull because you shouldn't expect anyone to be around. Paging/sms/email is best for this. After all, these are already used and it's not slack makes these obsolete.

vacri 10y ago
The integrations are indeed a gimmick. They consume so much space that they end up being shoved into their own channel, where nobody ever looks... so what was the point of them again?
- cracell 10y ago
  Completely disagree. There's a tons and tons of ways to use them. Sure it can be gimmick or it can be an extremely valuable tool and usually they are somewhere in-between. In my own experience I've found they are a great replacement for many different types of email notifications such are exceptions from an application. Things you want to glance at and maybe take action on. When these are an email I have to "manage" them, choose where to put them or to delete them or whatever. And I eventually end up just filtering them into an inbox I rarely look at. As a channel though it's just the right amount of attention and time to them. Took some time adjusting settings to get the right level of exceptions to show up and we still have them all in the exception tracker itself. The other thing is I only check my email a couple times a day. because most of what goes into my inbox is not time sensitive. Whereas Slack is always on if I'm working so I will instantly see if there's a major issue on the site. Of course every company is different and has different needs. But writing off all integrations as a gimmick is narrow minded.
  - educar 10y ago
    It's a gimmick based on why you came to use the tool. My understanding is that it's goal is for team communication and all these alerts are simply distracting. But maybe slack should position itself as an advanced alert management tool (which is what many seem to use it for).
- ianbarton 10y ago
  I agree that some integrations are a gimmick, but having content relevant integrations has helped out our team immensely. We'll have channels specific to a project, so notifications that JIRA stories have been resolved, knowing if a build fails, exception logs from production, are all intertwined with us discussing the project throughout the day so they get exposure. One thing that we've loved is being able to log information into other tools when it is top of mind. Discussing a recent bug that you noticed "/jirio create bug Username can contain spaces" and it's logged in JIRA to be dealt with accordingly. The potential for custom integrations is incredible but obviously keeping the noise level down is key.
  - kuschku 10y ago
    So, in best case, the integrations are equivalent to the whole ecosystem of IRC integrations in existence? That's interesting. And still leads to the question "why slack, not IRC"?
    - michaelt 10y ago
      I've asked that question myself - particularly considering how expensive slack is. Some differences include: 1. Secure usernames integrated properly into the protocol, instead of relying on nickserv and configuring your client to send a dm when you connect which is far from a simple/intuitive system. This includes options for google/corporate single-sign-on and 2-factor auth. 2. Infinite searchable scrollback which keeps position properly across multiple devices. As an experienced IRC user I can achieve something similar using ssh+screen+irssi - but it's hard to use even for advanced users, and I can't imagine trying to use it from my phone. 3. Offline messaging that doesn't rely on the user knowing the right magic commands to activate the bot. Bob is offline - do I need to !tell bob whatever or !ask bob whatever? Can I DM it to the bot to avoid spamming the channel? What's the help command? Can I use that over DM? Is there even a bot in this channel? 4. Integrations are exceptionally easy to write. You can post to a channel with a single curl command. Obviously writing IRC bots is possible, but it's a lot more complicated. For me personally, even these differences taken together don't seem worth the expense of slack. But I would understand if other people see it differently, especially if they're not that experienced with IRC.
mmaunder 10y ago
I disagree. Twitter integration is great because it gives us a way to have tweets about our brand appear and we can discuss each one if needed. Munin integration via our bot just alerted us to the Linode DDoS today. We've created our own bot which recognizes bug ID's and expands the bug with title, description and status and a link. Same with support tickets. Also our bot can draw cows on demand. Very important that.
- rekoros 10y ago
  Twitter-wise, even better is to respond from Slack to tweets in real time with this integration — https://sameroom.io/integrations/respond-to-twitter-from-slack https://sameroom.io/integrations/respond-to-twitter-from-sla... [0] [0] shameless
  - mmaunder 10y ago
    Thanks for sharing. A channel for every tweet would create a lot of channels for us. We've had a few hundred tweets today. https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=wordfence&src=typd https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=wordf... In general our workflow is to have 2 people in the org able to reply to tweets. And the rest of us are the peanut gallery just expressing what we think in the channel. So it works better to have it read-only in a single channel - at least for our purposes. Right now we just see name, username, link and tweet. So it might be useful to unfurl that a little and show number of followers/following and give permissions to specific usernames to reply in-channel. Also create @channel or @username alerts when a twitter user has more than X followers - although I really hate that idea because I've seen people who (I'm pretty sure) buy followers bullying companies on twitter to get VIP treatment - but I guess that could be useful too.
    - rekoros 10y ago
      It's a channel for every "conversation", not tweet. The benefit here is that you can keep talking to someone without asking them to email support@company.com. There is usually a window of open channels -- 15 or 40, say, that remain active in parallel. Oldest channels outside the window get auto-archived. You can also favorite directly from Slack with "-sameroom <3". Only those people who are "on call" will actually see the channels (for details, see https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Cg7LQOVZbkm8tmUyc_yJsp8eKHimWBS3XbaejQL3GCU/edit# https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Cg7LQOVZbkm8tmUyc_yJsp8e...)
zvrba 10y ago
Sharing files is another convenience which is also in the free edition.
stephengillie 10y ago
> 2. Don't expect people to be online. It's the same as irc. If people are there, they are expecting to be interrupted / they are feeling helpful at that moment. One of the reasons I don't like Slack is that people contact me when I'm off shift. I support APAC and so work different hours from most of my company. If I have a problem, I have to either email someone, or DM someone who isn't online. Either way, my voice goes into the black hole. Likewise, they return my DM in the morning, and their reply goes into the void if Slack doesn't wake me. But with our corporate culture buying into the "always online" concept of Slack, I can't easily communicate how email-like it can be. Slack isn't necessarily the problem in many situations. The problem is often how the tool highlights personal and culture problems instead of helping to smooth them over, by making them less evident. Email and other asynchronous communication can hide gaps in an organization by removing the pressure to respond immediately.
- briandear 10y ago
  Can't you just set your status to away and not respond? People can email you when you aren't working as well. It's no different.
- a-saleh 10y ago
  This really seems to be a culture problem. We have long time established custom, that if you want to communicate with somebody via chat, you send him a 'ping' first, and wait if he responds.
  - mikestew 10y ago
    We have long time established custom, that if you want to communicate with somebody via chat, you send him a 'ping' first, and wait if he responds. On my list of pet peeves, this one is near the top. Nothing annoys me more than getting a chat message as follows: "Hey..." Because it's apparently not enough to bother me with a DM, one must first make sure that the "ping" is a complete waste of electrons, apparently. Once my train of thought is completely broken, then and only then are conditions right so as to allow the individual to fully absorb the weight of what you are about to type. Here's an idea: how about typing WTF it is that you want, and if I respond you'll know I'm online. Typing "got a minute?" w/o any context is a sure-fired way to get me to ignore you. With that screed out of the way, I am open to arguments on the value of sending a "ping" first. Better make it convincing. :-)
lmm 10y ago
Integrations are useful to avoid an extra step, especially when the person you want is exactly the person who is "expecting to be interrupted / they are feeling helpful at that moment". E.g. when someone submits a PR - email would fill up everyone's inbox, paging/sms would be far too noisy. What you want is whoever's available at the moment to go review it - so Slack is the best channel to be notified.
theknarf 10y ago
Having build statuses posted in a channel for each commit is a great for forcing CI and CD.
swalsh 10y ago
"Integrations.. are a gimmick" I disagree, some are. Giphy, though a pleasure to have on the team is a gimmick. Hubot is an essential member of the team. Our company is deploying pretty much all day, and the integration of our deployment system with the bot scripts make things so much easier.
- krisdol 10y ago
  Agreed. We have custom integrations with Sensu and Kapacitor to alert us about HTTP 500 errors, services with high resource usage, scheduled tasks that didn't succeed, etc.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  > Giphy, though a pleasure to have on the team I couldn't disagree more. I hate giphy integrations, and I disable them in any room I have any control in. It becomes abused far too easily, and the results are so rarely relevant. "/giphy high five" will return a gif of someone high-fiving 30% of the time, and will return nonsense garbage the rest of the time, prompting people to try, try again, flooding the room with animated images of celebrities, minions, or whatever other garbage someone has uploaded and tagged poorly. And that's not counting the one jackass who just gets bored and starts flooding the room with random gifs. (That happens much more rarely in work-dedicated channels, but it makes off-topic rooms a chore.) 100% gimmick, 0% pleasure.
  - piquadrat 10y ago
    > "/giphy high five" will return a gif of someone high-fiving 30% of the time, and will return nonsense garbage the rest of the time Try https://rightgif.com/ https://rightgif.com/. Although it's one of those products that make you think tech startups have finally jumped the shark, it works surprisingly well.
  - dvanduzer 10y ago
    > control This is the heart of the issue. If you are in a room that you don't like being in, then leave the room. Communicating with other humans is difficult. If your team can't come to an understanding about how you have fun together, then you have much bigger problems.

by educar 10y ago

vacri 10y ago

The integrations are indeed a gimmick. They consume so much space that they end up being shoved into their own channel, where nobody ever looks... so what was the point of them again?

cracell 10y ago
Completely disagree. There's a tons and tons of ways to use them. Sure it can be gimmick or it can be an extremely valuable tool and usually they are somewhere in-between. In my own experience I've found they are a great replacement for many different types of email notifications such are exceptions from an application. Things you want to glance at and maybe take action on. When these are an email I have to "manage" them, choose where to put them or to delete them or whatever. And I eventually end up just filtering them into an inbox I rarely look at. As a channel though it's just the right amount of attention and time to them. Took some time adjusting settings to get the right level of exceptions to show up and we still have them all in the exception tracker itself. The other thing is I only check my email a couple times a day. because most of what goes into my inbox is not time sensitive. Whereas Slack is always on if I'm working so I will instantly see if there's a major issue on the site. Of course every company is different and has different needs. But writing off all integrations as a gimmick is narrow minded.
- educar 10y ago
  It's a gimmick based on why you came to use the tool. My understanding is that it's goal is for team communication and all these alerts are simply distracting. But maybe slack should position itself as an advanced alert management tool (which is what many seem to use it for).
ianbarton 10y ago
I agree that some integrations are a gimmick, but having content relevant integrations has helped out our team immensely. We'll have channels specific to a project, so notifications that JIRA stories have been resolved, knowing if a build fails, exception logs from production, are all intertwined with us discussing the project throughout the day so they get exposure. One thing that we've loved is being able to log information into other tools when it is top of mind. Discussing a recent bug that you noticed "/jirio create bug Username can contain spaces" and it's logged in JIRA to be dealt with accordingly. The potential for custom integrations is incredible but obviously keeping the noise level down is key.
- kuschku 10y ago
  So, in best case, the integrations are equivalent to the whole ecosystem of IRC integrations in existence? That's interesting. And still leads to the question "why slack, not IRC"?
  - michaelt 10y ago
    I've asked that question myself - particularly considering how expensive slack is. Some differences include: 1. Secure usernames integrated properly into the protocol, instead of relying on nickserv and configuring your client to send a dm when you connect which is far from a simple/intuitive system. This includes options for google/corporate single-sign-on and 2-factor auth. 2. Infinite searchable scrollback which keeps position properly across multiple devices. As an experienced IRC user I can achieve something similar using ssh+screen+irssi - but it's hard to use even for advanced users, and I can't imagine trying to use it from my phone. 3. Offline messaging that doesn't rely on the user knowing the right magic commands to activate the bot. Bob is offline - do I need to !tell bob whatever or !ask bob whatever? Can I DM it to the bot to avoid spamming the channel? What's the help command? Can I use that over DM? Is there even a bot in this channel? 4. Integrations are exceptionally easy to write. You can post to a channel with a single curl command. Obviously writing IRC bots is possible, but it's a lot more complicated. For me personally, even these differences taken together don't seem worth the expense of slack. But I would understand if other people see it differently, especially if they're not that experienced with IRC.

mmaunder 10y ago

I disagree. Twitter integration is great because it gives us a way to have tweets about our brand appear and we can discuss each one if needed. Munin integration via our bot just alerted us to the Linode DDoS today. We've created our own bot which recognizes bug ID's and expands the bug with title, description and status and a link. Same with support tickets. Also our bot can draw cows on demand. Very important that.

rekoros 10y ago
Twitter-wise, even better is to respond from Slack to tweets in real time with this integration — https://sameroom.io/integrations/respond-to-twitter-from-slack https://sameroom.io/integrations/respond-to-twitter-from-sla... [0] [0] shameless
- mmaunder 10y ago
  Thanks for sharing. A channel for every tweet would create a lot of channels for us. We've had a few hundred tweets today. https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=wordfence&src=typd https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=wordf... In general our workflow is to have 2 people in the org able to reply to tweets. And the rest of us are the peanut gallery just expressing what we think in the channel. So it works better to have it read-only in a single channel - at least for our purposes. Right now we just see name, username, link and tweet. So it might be useful to unfurl that a little and show number of followers/following and give permissions to specific usernames to reply in-channel. Also create @channel or @username alerts when a twitter user has more than X followers - although I really hate that idea because I've seen people who (I'm pretty sure) buy followers bullying companies on twitter to get VIP treatment - but I guess that could be useful too.
  - rekoros 10y ago
    It's a channel for every "conversation", not tweet. The benefit here is that you can keep talking to someone without asking them to email support@company.com. There is usually a window of open channels -- 15 or 40, say, that remain active in parallel. Oldest channels outside the window get auto-archived. You can also favorite directly from Slack with "-sameroom <3". Only those people who are "on call" will actually see the channels (for details, see https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Cg7LQOVZbkm8tmUyc_yJsp8eKHimWBS3XbaejQL3GCU/edit# https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Cg7LQOVZbkm8tmUyc_yJsp8e...)

zvrba 10y ago

Sharing files is another convenience which is also in the free edition.

stephengillie 10y ago

> 2. Don't expect people to be online. It's the same as irc. If people are there, they are expecting to be interrupted / they are feeling helpful at that moment. One of the reasons I don't like Slack is that people contact me when I'm off shift. I support APAC and so work different hours from most of my company. If I have a problem, I have to either email someone, or DM someone who isn't online. Either way, my voice goes into the black hole. Likewise, they return my DM in the morning, and their reply goes into the void if Slack doesn't wake me. But with our corporate culture buying into the "always online" concept of Slack, I can't easily communicate how email-like it can be. Slack isn't necessarily the problem in many situations. The problem is often how the tool highlights personal and culture problems instead of helping to smooth them over, by making them less evident. Email and other asynchronous communication can hide gaps in an organization by removing the pressure to respond immediately.

briandear 10y ago
Can't you just set your status to away and not respond? People can email you when you aren't working as well. It's no different.
a-saleh 10y ago
This really seems to be a culture problem. We have long time established custom, that if you want to communicate with somebody via chat, you send him a 'ping' first, and wait if he responds.
- mikestew 10y ago
  We have long time established custom, that if you want to communicate with somebody via chat, you send him a 'ping' first, and wait if he responds. On my list of pet peeves, this one is near the top. Nothing annoys me more than getting a chat message as follows: "Hey..." Because it's apparently not enough to bother me with a DM, one must first make sure that the "ping" is a complete waste of electrons, apparently. Once my train of thought is completely broken, then and only then are conditions right so as to allow the individual to fully absorb the weight of what you are about to type. Here's an idea: how about typing WTF it is that you want, and if I respond you'll know I'm online. Typing "got a minute?" w/o any context is a sure-fired way to get me to ignore you. With that screed out of the way, I am open to arguments on the value of sending a "ping" first. Better make it convincing. :-)

lmm 10y ago

Integrations are useful to avoid an extra step, especially when the person you want is exactly the person who is "expecting to be interrupted / they are feeling helpful at that moment". E.g. when someone submits a PR - email would fill up everyone's inbox, paging/sms would be far too noisy. What you want is whoever's available at the moment to go review it - so Slack is the best channel to be notified.

theknarf 10y ago

Having build statuses posted in a channel for each commit is a great for forcing CI and CD.

swalsh 10y ago

"Integrations.. are a gimmick" I disagree, some are. Giphy, though a pleasure to have on the team is a gimmick. Hubot is an essential member of the team. Our company is deploying pretty much all day, and the integration of our deployment system with the bot scripts make things so much easier.

krisdol 10y ago
Agreed. We have custom integrations with Sensu and Kapacitor to alert us about HTTP 500 errors, services with high resource usage, scheduled tasks that didn't succeed, etc.
pavel_lishin 10y ago
> Giphy, though a pleasure to have on the team I couldn't disagree more. I hate giphy integrations, and I disable them in any room I have any control in. It becomes abused far too easily, and the results are so rarely relevant. "/giphy high five" will return a gif of someone high-fiving 30% of the time, and will return nonsense garbage the rest of the time, prompting people to try, try again, flooding the room with animated images of celebrities, minions, or whatever other garbage someone has uploaded and tagged poorly. And that's not counting the one jackass who just gets bored and starts flooding the room with random gifs. (That happens much more rarely in work-dedicated channels, but it makes off-topic rooms a chore.) 100% gimmick, 0% pleasure.
- piquadrat 10y ago
  > "/giphy high five" will return a gif of someone high-fiving 30% of the time, and will return nonsense garbage the rest of the time Try https://rightgif.com/ https://rightgif.com/. Although it's one of those products that make you think tech startups have finally jumped the shark, it works surprisingly well.
- dvanduzer 10y ago
  > control This is the heart of the issue. If you are in a room that you don't like being in, then leave the room. Communicating with other humans is difficult. If your team can't come to an understanding about how you have fun together, then you have much bigger problems.