7 ms·

We Tried Slack and We Deeply Regretted It (2015)

76 points by hackerkid 10y ago

yunolisten 10y ago
Perhaps put the year of posting in the title? Has anything changed since this has been published?
quirkot 10y ago
I'm generally a slack fan, but isn't that just plain ol' illegal false advertising?
- grepthisab 10y ago
  It kind of reminds me of cell network "unlimited data" where they just start aggressively throttling customers after a certain amount of data use.
  - pbtflakes 10y ago
    This being distinct from that by being entirely undocumented, instead of burying the data limitations somewhere deep in the contract.
    - grepthisab 10y ago
      My understanding is that in cases like this below, there was no limitation anywhere in the contract. Hence the FCC fine: http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/19/13330158/t-mobile-unlimited-data-settlement-fine-discount-free-data http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/19/13330158/t-mobile-unlimit...
      - pbtflakes 10y ago
        Whoops, hadn't heard about that case. Nice to hear the FCC is addressing deceptive marketing/contracts.
- lilbobbytables 10y ago
  It sounds like more of an engineering issue. I'd imagine that unlimited-up-to-the-capacity-our-system-can-handle is reasonable. The biggest takeaway from this should be: if you think you might be pushing a system, you should probably talk to a human first to get confirmation on how it will work for your specific scenario, and not just use their sales page. Particularly when that tool is so important to your operations.
  - quirkot 10y ago
    >> The biggest takeaway from this should be: if you think you might be pushing a system, you should probably talk to a human first Two things: a) I wouldn't blink at 10k if my line in the sand was "Unlimited number of people" (would I similarly ask a human if Amharic glyphs are supported if the advertisement suggested "chat in all languages"?) b) It may behoove me to verify claims before jumping in, but it is absolutely 100% the responsibility of the organization to set expectations in line with what it can deliver
- mattmanser 10y ago
  To be fair to slack, the quote is "there's no limit to the amount of people you can add to your team". They're saying that as you team grows, there's no limit. Not students or subscribers. Not "public channel", or "chat room", or some sort of phrase that indicates a large mass of people. If someone decided to sue them or something, I'd assume they'd have an easy defence saying they clearly meant a team of work colleagues. As many others are saying here, slack simply doesn't seem to be aimed at this use case.
  - lmm 10y ago
    I have worked for companies with 25000 "team members", so that seems pretty unconvincing.
- Ensorceled 10y ago
  It might if they were paying for 10000 users but only some power of 2 less than 10000 could actually sign up. And Slack refused to refund the difference. False advertising regulations aren't a company destroying "gotcha" like felony theft, they are designed to protect consumers from fraud. Having some technical issue that doesn't impact the vast majority of consumers isn't what it's designed for.
- drfuchs 10y ago
  Not if the "customer" paid $0. If I give you something for free, you have no recourse if I didn't describe it to you properly.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
Spooky23 10y ago
Sounds like a manifestation of the 6 p's: Proper Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance.
dusing 10y ago
8,462 users on a free plan with no intention of upgrading to paid.
- simonlc 10y ago
  He never said he had no intention, I just think he didn't want to pay half a million dollars for slack.
  - gizmo 10y ago
    He wouldn't have paid $50,000 per year either. It's pretty obvious he signed up with the full intention of staying on the free version forever.
    - mulletbum 10y ago
      Paying would not have helped him anyway.
- lucideer 10y ago
  On a service where all paid plans charge per user, starting to pay when you reach a point when their free plan is no longer suitable for your high number of users is always going to be a ridiculous proposition for even the cheapest plan. The Slack pricing structure is not designed for this use case.
- mrgoldenbrown 10y ago
  ... on a free plan specifically advertised as supporting unlimited users, and advertised with an open source discount "coming soon".
saas_sam 10y ago
Sounds like most of the issues were due to not paying for the product. Which is fair given Slack's freemium model but I wonder if they were throttling free users after a certain point, causing performance issues. If I was this guy I would've reached out to Slack's sales team and explained the situation to see if they could offer a compelling deal. They might've seen a huge discount as worthwhile given it would get 5000+ coders using Slack regularly, many of whom would then promote in other companies.
- Svip 10y ago
  If you read the article, it's clear the user limit was a technical limit and not a freemium limit. So even if they did pay, Slack would still not have been able to accommodate all their users. Which leads me to my old-timer question: What's wrong with IRC?
  - erelde 10y ago
    No history by default, in fact there's only text by default. I like IRC, but newer generations are used to having "full-featured" chats without setup (beauty is in the eye of the beholder). I also like being able to do some simple markdown in my messages.
    - Insanity 10y ago
      I like IRC, recently started using irccloud. That makes sharing files easier, also keeps a history of the irc channels you are in, and makes it look more pretty. It's a combination of both worlds I suppose. So far I am enjoying it.
  - dagenleg 10y ago
    IRC doesn't have cool stickers?
  - onion2k 10y ago
    There's nothing wrong with IRC except for the fact that the user experience in an IRC client is generally horrible. They're not pretty, there's no good account system so users can easily spoof being someone else, the logging isn't great by default, sharing files is hard, and whether or not you can do media embedding depends on the channel setup. There's a reason why companies like Slack have built billion dollar businesses doing ostensibly the same thing as IRC, and it's because IRC doesn't offer enough value even if it's free.
morinted 10y ago
This was very similar to the Reactiflux move to Discord: https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/10/19/reactiflux-is-moving-to-discord.html https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/10/19/reactiflux-... (October 2015) To be fair, Slack never really said it was made to support that many users. Even in my team of less than 20 on the free tier, we hit the 10,000 message limit really quickly. I can't imagine how that must have been with 8 thousand users.
dahart 10y ago
The author's expectations just seem wildly unrealistic, I can't find much sympathy. Signed up for a pay service with a clear limit on the trial, yet was surprised by the limit, even though he knew how many Slack users he had and knew or should have known how many messages per day they were already sending. Put his community (customers) of thousands on the Slack team, even though the advertising and economics only make sense for internal teams. He is trying so hard to make his own mistake sound like Slack's fault. Also, previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9754626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9754626
- __jal 10y ago
  You appear to be confusing the message archive limits with the number of user limits. The first is (loudly) disclosed. The second, apparently not.
  - erelde 10y ago
    Slack doesn't advertise as a chat for thousands of users, but teams of 5 to 50, worse case 100 people. It's "lucky" they didn't hard code a limit.
    - mcintyre1994 10y ago
      They did hard code a limit, the API has a specific error for that. They just choose not to disclose it, and to advertise with the phrase "Slack is free to use for as long as you want for teams of all sizes."
      - erelde 10y ago
        Well then I guess they expect the word "team" should be self explanatory... Maybe it's not.
        dahart 10y ago
        This is a completely legitimate point. They are expecting "team" to be self explanatory, and it is a vague term that is not self-explanatory. If there's a size limit, it would be best if they stated that plainly. But, come on, you have to admit that an online community of thousands of people does not fit even the most charitable interpretation of the word "team".
vorpalhex 10y ago
I switched over a large group of friends from using a gazillion hangouts to slack and it's mostly been an improvement. That being said, there's a lot less of us: around 30. I'm definitely disappointed to hear about this. The pricing model sucks for us as well since it means $60 a head to add someone to the friend group if we wanted to pay for slack. If we could pay a fixed price and get a slightly better message history and more integrations, I'd gladly pay it, but per-head is just ridiculous. We also use Discord for online gaming since it's easier to invite people outside the group. It's been absolutely fantastic, but we had issues with some people not having access at work.
- dpark 10y ago
  Slack isn't intended for "friends". Their business model is clearly aimed at supporting teams inside businesses. $60 per head is absurd for a tool to chat with friends but pretty reasonable for a business that gets real value from the tool.
  - vorpalhex 10y ago
    They clearly indicate otherwise. Slack is certainly meant as a productivity tool, but they make several claims: + For all kinds of "Work" + For teams of all types and sizes + Bringing people together to make them productive Compare that to the messaging for say Hipchat: + "Team chat built for business" + Enterprise features + Loved by your IT team (Edit - Formatting)
    - dpark 10y ago
      I think you're selectively reading what you want to see. Slack's title line is "Where Work Happens". Work, teams, and productivity normally are not terms you use to describe chatting with friends.
- xkxx 10y ago
  > we had issues with some people not having access at work. Do you know why it happens? Do those companies block Discord as an "unprofessional" website?
wmccullough 10y ago
So wait, you abused a free service to the extreme and you're complaining about the service not meeting your expectations? Grow up.
- jalfresi 10y ago
  It's not abuse if they were well within the terms laid out for the free service
HalfwayToDice 10y ago
How to view Medium pages on Safari Mavericks without crashing the browser? It's been happening for weeks.
- aaronm14 10y ago
  Similar situation on El Capitan.. it doesn't crash the browser but gives a lot of "Safari Web Content quit unexpectedly." I felt like it had to be just me because how could something so glaringly obvious be the case for everyone and they not fix it?
- throwanem 10y ago
  Try blocking Javascript for medium.com? I'm sure there's a plugin for that, but use Firefox for general browsing on all platforms where it's a thing, so can't make a specific recommendation. I do have the same problem in Safari on iOS 9.3.5, but I suppose that must have tab isolation, since the whole browser doesn't go down.
  - zedadex 10y ago
    Ublock's advanced features are pretty nice + handy for selective script enabling/disabling. It does it by origin rather than kind of course, but if you're looking for a quick toggle you might already have one in your toolbar :)
dbg31415 10y ago
* Enterprise Grid || https://slack.com/enterprise https://slack.com/enterprise Worth noting that 1) the author's expectations were wildly unrealistic. 2) Slack has since come out with better tools to manage large teams.
eddd 10y ago
TL; DR: Slack costs money and that's why we didn't like it.
- spraak 10y ago
  You missed where they said that Slack's actual infrastructure couldn't handle it
jjawssd 10y ago
This could have been completely avoided if they had used Mattermost.
- favadi 10y ago
  Do you know if there is any mattermost installation with over 5000 users.
  - it33 10y ago
    Mattermost team here. Yes, there are multiple Mattermost deployments over 5000 users within enterprises.
    - favadi 10y ago
      Good to know that mattermost works for that large team size!
DanHulton 10y ago
Hm. Well, that made me a bit concerned to start, as I'm working on a Slack-based hack-and-slash RPG [1] that I'm planning on running entirely on their free tier, but I'm pretty sure that their use cases differ from mine significantly. I'm not worried about message archives (as it's just game history), and I have @here/@all locked down significantly. The "max user size" thing is a bit worrisome, but MMOs have a history of sharding to solve that problem anyway, so hopefully that shouldn't be a problem either. (Players will be able to chat together in a shared Discourse forum, so sharding shouldn't really hurt community-building.) I wonder if any progress has been made since then to support larger teams, though? It's been quite a while, and Slack's engineering team has been cranking out a lot of great features and improvements lately. [1] http://www.slackandslash.com http://www.slackandslash.com
- jerf 10y ago
  Are you planning on trying to make money with this? If so, you're in some amount of trouble, depending on how much you're looking at trying to make. If you're not trying to make money, you still should check the agreements for Slack; this may constitute abuse. You should also take a look at your architecture, too. You've got a clear message bus where you send things to and receive things from Slack. You may notice that where those messages go matters less to your code than you may think. If you find you can't go with slack, it may not be all that hard to simply set up a web site that plays your text-based game by shimming the message flow in and out, in which case you can do whatever you like, at whatever rate you like. Despite the slick name, you may not need Slack at all. You'd still have the conceit of the chatbot experience, which will definitely appeal to a certain niche, just as MUDs did. (And that name may be too slick. I don't know how nasty Slack is inclined to be, but directly referencing brand names in your name like that is dangerous from a trademark perspective.)
  - DanHulton 10y ago
    I don't think I trip up the agreements anywhere, I've checked over them a few times and also emailed Slack to ask if it was cool if I made a game on their platform before I started. I didn't share too many specifics (I said it was MUD-like and was going to use their buttons), but they told me to go for it, so I think I'm in the clear there. Also, while I haven't figured out monetization, I don't think there should be any real problems with that either. Other people charge for their slack bots and integrations, so unless they specifically have a problem with a game-style slackbot charging money, there shouldn't be anything preventing me from charging for stuff. You very well may be right about the name, though. I've just registered "chatandslash.com" as a backup that I can switch to before too much marketing has gone forward, and I've already emailed Slack again to show them what I've come up with and for further confirmation that what I'm up to is fine and dandy before progressing any further. Oh, and you're totally right about shimming out Slack with my own frontend. It's in the backlog of stuff to do some day potentially, but I think there's a lot to be gained in the meantime by explicitly staying with Slack in the meantime. "An RPG you play in Slack" is a lot more interesting than "An RPG that looks kinda like chat, I guess". Thanks for the advice!
mi100hael 10y ago
There's a perfect alternative: * Free * Handles thousands of users seamlessly * Archived via bot same as free Slack * No noticeable performance hit for high user volumes * Wide variety of interfaces and integration bots to choose from * Widely deployed and trusted across tech communities It's called IRC. Edit: I can tell more people are encountering challenges using Slack these days. In the past, a suggestion to use IRC would have been downvoted to hell and back! A lot of people seem hung up on the history, file sharing, or some other feature that Slack has, so I thought I'd take a moment to expand on my ideal setup and how they translate from Slack: * Long-lived documentation and important team knowledge: Wiki pages (which I prefer even when using Slack and pins or history search are available). Full history of edits is visible and it's easy to access/search. * Discussions involving a large number of stakeholders: Email. Threads and the async nature of the protocol make it well-suited to discussions when users aren't all online at the same time and the discussion is more thoughtful and isn't moving quickly. Slack threads suck replies aren't very visible and history scrolls quickly in active channels. * Discussions involving outages, current tasks, and other immediate needs: IRC. It's real time, cross-platform, etc. History can be archived for later searching, but CHAT HISOTRY != DOCUMENTATION. Post-mortems and that sort of thing should end up in a wiki or similar. * File sharing can be done via some other service with a link pasted into chat. One extra step to paste the link manually isn't a big deal.
- ATsch 10y ago
  It's a shame there has not been an easy, free way to solve the major problems with IRC for everybody: - no history while you are not in a channel - lack of modern features like sending images and lack of good UX - no mobile notifications Matrix.org solves these problems very well IMO, but it's adoption is abysmal too.
  - lorenzhs 10y ago
    All of these problems are solvable, though: - Commonly addressed with logging bots and a link to the log in the topic - Some clients have this: when you drag an image into Glowing Bear (a web frontend for WeeChat that I'm working on), it gets uploaded to imgur and a link to the image is pasted in the channel. It can also display images and videos inline if you wish. - Easily handled with services like push{over,bullet} The problem is that these things don't work out of the box and that there's a learning curve. It's just not a very friendly experience for newcomers.
altern8tif 10y ago
This has been a sore point for many communities (see the Digital Nomads + React communities). But if Slack were smart about it, they'll realise that there's an opportunity here. They are a very well-funded company and it wouldn't hurt to spend some resources to beef up their current code/infrastructure or to even spin up a separate product that they can profit from.
nottorp 10y ago
Speaking of Slack, what's an alternative with a different pricing model? We have a core team that's always around, and for that Slack pricing is fine, but we have a significant number of "drive by" users that aren't worth paying $60 per year. We're generally happy with Slack's features, so which are the similar services that charge something different than per-user?
- jjawssd 10y ago
  Mattermost is a complete replacement for Slack. I really don't understand why people use Slack if they don't use the integrations, which in my opinion are quite unnecessary in many cases.
Nomentatus 10y ago
Like the author, I'm always "that guy" who plays a game or uses a program in a way that seems reasonable, or optimal to me (and often is very efficient) but is so unusual that the program eventually "falls off the edge of the world" and starts crashing all over the place because none of the beta-testers ever did anything quite like what I'm doing with the program. Like this guy, I usually don't know at first just what is so unusual about my behavior, and often I never do find out. My favorite game (not yet a decade old) crashes every several minutes for me, playing the way I like. I just save extremely frequently and keep right on playing it. The moral: Where business is concerned: "Be a smart herder" - don't make any false moves, or adopt odd implementations or uses of key software products (or software controlled products) because the minute your behavior is similar to only 1/1000 users (sometimes 1/100 users), you are using the equivalent of an alpha or beta product, and you should count on getting zero product support. Your complaints will, likely, not even be properly comprehended or will be understood, but labeled "impossible" and abruptly closed (I'm looking at you Open Office.)

76 points by hackerkid 10y ago

yunolisten 10y ago

Perhaps put the year of posting in the title? Has anything changed since this has been published?

quirkot 10y ago

I'm generally a slack fan, but isn't that just plain ol' illegal false advertising?

grepthisab 10y ago
It kind of reminds me of cell network "unlimited data" where they just start aggressively throttling customers after a certain amount of data use.
- pbtflakes 10y ago
  This being distinct from that by being entirely undocumented, instead of burying the data limitations somewhere deep in the contract.
  - grepthisab 10y ago
    My understanding is that in cases like this below, there was no limitation anywhere in the contract. Hence the FCC fine: http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/19/13330158/t-mobile-unlimited-data-settlement-fine-discount-free-data http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/19/13330158/t-mobile-unlimit...
    - pbtflakes 10y ago
      Whoops, hadn't heard about that case. Nice to hear the FCC is addressing deceptive marketing/contracts.
lilbobbytables 10y ago
It sounds like more of an engineering issue. I'd imagine that unlimited-up-to-the-capacity-our-system-can-handle is reasonable. The biggest takeaway from this should be: if you think you might be pushing a system, you should probably talk to a human first to get confirmation on how it will work for your specific scenario, and not just use their sales page. Particularly when that tool is so important to your operations.
- quirkot 10y ago
  >> The biggest takeaway from this should be: if you think you might be pushing a system, you should probably talk to a human first Two things: a) I wouldn't blink at 10k if my line in the sand was "Unlimited number of people" (would I similarly ask a human if Amharic glyphs are supported if the advertisement suggested "chat in all languages"?) b) It may behoove me to verify claims before jumping in, but it is absolutely 100% the responsibility of the organization to set expectations in line with what it can deliver
mattmanser 10y ago
To be fair to slack, the quote is "there's no limit to the amount of people you can add to your team". They're saying that as you team grows, there's no limit. Not students or subscribers. Not "public channel", or "chat room", or some sort of phrase that indicates a large mass of people. If someone decided to sue them or something, I'd assume they'd have an easy defence saying they clearly meant a team of work colleagues. As many others are saying here, slack simply doesn't seem to be aimed at this use case.
- lmm 10y ago
  I have worked for companies with 25000 "team members", so that seems pretty unconvincing.
Ensorceled 10y ago
It might if they were paying for 10000 users but only some power of 2 less than 10000 could actually sign up. And Slack refused to refund the difference. False advertising regulations aren't a company destroying "gotcha" like felony theft, they are designed to protect consumers from fraud. Having some technical issue that doesn't impact the vast majority of consumers isn't what it's designed for.
drfuchs 10y ago
Not if the "customer" paid $0. If I give you something for free, you have no recourse if I didn't describe it to you properly.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

Spooky23 10y ago

Sounds like a manifestation of the 6 p's: Proper Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance.

dusing 10y ago

8,462 users on a free plan with no intention of upgrading to paid.

simonlc 10y ago
He never said he had no intention, I just think he didn't want to pay half a million dollars for slack.
- gizmo 10y ago
  He wouldn't have paid $50,000 per year either. It's pretty obvious he signed up with the full intention of staying on the free version forever.
  - mulletbum 10y ago
    Paying would not have helped him anyway.
lucideer 10y ago
On a service where all paid plans charge per user, starting to pay when you reach a point when their free plan is no longer suitable for your high number of users is always going to be a ridiculous proposition for even the cheapest plan. The Slack pricing structure is not designed for this use case.
mrgoldenbrown 10y ago
... on a free plan specifically advertised as supporting unlimited users, and advertised with an open source discount "coming soon".

saas_sam 10y ago

Sounds like most of the issues were due to not paying for the product. Which is fair given Slack's freemium model but I wonder if they were throttling free users after a certain point, causing performance issues. If I was this guy I would've reached out to Slack's sales team and explained the situation to see if they could offer a compelling deal. They might've seen a huge discount as worthwhile given it would get 5000+ coders using Slack regularly, many of whom would then promote in other companies.

Svip 10y ago
If you read the article, it's clear the user limit was a technical limit and not a freemium limit. So even if they did pay, Slack would still not have been able to accommodate all their users. Which leads me to my old-timer question: What's wrong with IRC?
- erelde 10y ago
  No history by default, in fact there's only text by default. I like IRC, but newer generations are used to having "full-featured" chats without setup (beauty is in the eye of the beholder). I also like being able to do some simple markdown in my messages.
  - Insanity 10y ago
    I like IRC, recently started using irccloud. That makes sharing files easier, also keeps a history of the irc channels you are in, and makes it look more pretty. It's a combination of both worlds I suppose. So far I am enjoying it.
- dagenleg 10y ago
  IRC doesn't have cool stickers?
- onion2k 10y ago
  There's nothing wrong with IRC except for the fact that the user experience in an IRC client is generally horrible. They're not pretty, there's no good account system so users can easily spoof being someone else, the logging isn't great by default, sharing files is hard, and whether or not you can do media embedding depends on the channel setup. There's a reason why companies like Slack have built billion dollar businesses doing ostensibly the same thing as IRC, and it's because IRC doesn't offer enough value even if it's free.

morinted 10y ago

This was very similar to the Reactiflux move to Discord: https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/10/19/reactiflux-is-moving-to-discord.html https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/10/19/reactiflux-... (October 2015) To be fair, Slack never really said it was made to support that many users. Even in my team of less than 20 on the free tier, we hit the 10,000 message limit really quickly. I can't imagine how that must have been with 8 thousand users.

dahart 10y ago

The author's expectations just seem wildly unrealistic, I can't find much sympathy. Signed up for a pay service with a clear limit on the trial, yet was surprised by the limit, even though he knew how many Slack users he had and knew or should have known how many messages per day they were already sending. Put his community (customers) of thousands on the Slack team, even though the advertising and economics only make sense for internal teams. He is trying so hard to make his own mistake sound like Slack's fault. Also, previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9754626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9754626

__jal 10y ago
You appear to be confusing the message archive limits with the number of user limits. The first is (loudly) disclosed. The second, apparently not.
- erelde 10y ago
  Slack doesn't advertise as a chat for thousands of users, but teams of 5 to 50, worse case 100 people. It's "lucky" they didn't hard code a limit.
  - mcintyre1994 10y ago
    They did hard code a limit, the API has a specific error for that. They just choose not to disclose it, and to advertise with the phrase "Slack is free to use for as long as you want for teams of all sizes."
    - erelde 10y ago
      Well then I guess they expect the word "team" should be self explanatory... Maybe it's not.
      - dahart 10y ago
        This is a completely legitimate point. They are expecting "team" to be self explanatory, and it is a vague term that is not self-explanatory. If there's a size limit, it would be best if they stated that plainly. But, come on, you have to admit that an online community of thousands of people does not fit even the most charitable interpretation of the word "team".

vorpalhex 10y ago

I switched over a large group of friends from using a gazillion hangouts to slack and it's mostly been an improvement. That being said, there's a lot less of us: around 30. I'm definitely disappointed to hear about this. The pricing model sucks for us as well since it means $60 a head to add someone to the friend group if we wanted to pay for slack. If we could pay a fixed price and get a slightly better message history and more integrations, I'd gladly pay it, but per-head is just ridiculous. We also use Discord for online gaming since it's easier to invite people outside the group. It's been absolutely fantastic, but we had issues with some people not having access at work.

dpark 10y ago
Slack isn't intended for "friends". Their business model is clearly aimed at supporting teams inside businesses. $60 per head is absurd for a tool to chat with friends but pretty reasonable for a business that gets real value from the tool.
- vorpalhex 10y ago
  They clearly indicate otherwise. Slack is certainly meant as a productivity tool, but they make several claims: + For all kinds of "Work" + For teams of all types and sizes + Bringing people together to make them productive Compare that to the messaging for say Hipchat: + "Team chat built for business" + Enterprise features + Loved by your IT team (Edit - Formatting)
  - dpark 10y ago
    I think you're selectively reading what you want to see. Slack's title line is "Where Work Happens". Work, teams, and productivity normally are not terms you use to describe chatting with friends.
xkxx 10y ago
> we had issues with some people not having access at work. Do you know why it happens? Do those companies block Discord as an "unprofessional" website?

wmccullough 10y ago

So wait, you abused a free service to the extreme and you're complaining about the service not meeting your expectations? Grow up.

jalfresi 10y ago
It's not abuse if they were well within the terms laid out for the free service

HalfwayToDice 10y ago

How to view Medium pages on Safari Mavericks without crashing the browser? It's been happening for weeks.

aaronm14 10y ago
Similar situation on El Capitan.. it doesn't crash the browser but gives a lot of "Safari Web Content quit unexpectedly." I felt like it had to be just me because how could something so glaringly obvious be the case for everyone and they not fix it?
throwanem 10y ago
Try blocking Javascript for medium.com? I'm sure there's a plugin for that, but use Firefox for general browsing on all platforms where it's a thing, so can't make a specific recommendation. I do have the same problem in Safari on iOS 9.3.5, but I suppose that must have tab isolation, since the whole browser doesn't go down.
- zedadex 10y ago
  Ublock's advanced features are pretty nice + handy for selective script enabling/disabling. It does it by origin rather than kind of course, but if you're looking for a quick toggle you might already have one in your toolbar :)

dbg31415 10y ago

* Enterprise Grid || https://slack.com/enterprise https://slack.com/enterprise Worth noting that 1) the author's expectations were wildly unrealistic. 2) Slack has since come out with better tools to manage large teams.

eddd 10y ago

TL; DR: Slack costs money and that's why we didn't like it.

spraak 10y ago
You missed where they said that Slack's actual infrastructure couldn't handle it

jjawssd 10y ago

This could have been completely avoided if they had used Mattermost.

favadi 10y ago
Do you know if there is any mattermost installation with over 5000 users.
- it33 10y ago
  Mattermost team here. Yes, there are multiple Mattermost deployments over 5000 users within enterprises.
  - favadi 10y ago
    Good to know that mattermost works for that large team size!

DanHulton 10y ago

Hm. Well, that made me a bit concerned to start, as I'm working on a Slack-based hack-and-slash RPG [1] that I'm planning on running entirely on their free tier, but I'm pretty sure that their use cases differ from mine significantly. I'm not worried about message archives (as it's just game history), and I have @here/@all locked down significantly. The "max user size" thing is a bit worrisome, but MMOs have a history of sharding to solve that problem anyway, so hopefully that shouldn't be a problem either. (Players will be able to chat together in a shared Discourse forum, so sharding shouldn't really hurt community-building.) I wonder if any progress has been made since then to support larger teams, though? It's been quite a while, and Slack's engineering team has been cranking out a lot of great features and improvements lately. [1] http://www.slackandslash.com http://www.slackandslash.com

jerf 10y ago
Are you planning on trying to make money with this? If so, you're in some amount of trouble, depending on how much you're looking at trying to make. If you're not trying to make money, you still should check the agreements for Slack; this may constitute abuse. You should also take a look at your architecture, too. You've got a clear message bus where you send things to and receive things from Slack. You may notice that where those messages go matters less to your code than you may think. If you find you can't go with slack, it may not be all that hard to simply set up a web site that plays your text-based game by shimming the message flow in and out, in which case you can do whatever you like, at whatever rate you like. Despite the slick name, you may not need Slack at all. You'd still have the conceit of the chatbot experience, which will definitely appeal to a certain niche, just as MUDs did. (And that name may be too slick. I don't know how nasty Slack is inclined to be, but directly referencing brand names in your name like that is dangerous from a trademark perspective.)
- DanHulton 10y ago
  I don't think I trip up the agreements anywhere, I've checked over them a few times and also emailed Slack to ask if it was cool if I made a game on their platform before I started. I didn't share too many specifics (I said it was MUD-like and was going to use their buttons), but they told me to go for it, so I think I'm in the clear there. Also, while I haven't figured out monetization, I don't think there should be any real problems with that either. Other people charge for their slack bots and integrations, so unless they specifically have a problem with a game-style slackbot charging money, there shouldn't be anything preventing me from charging for stuff. You very well may be right about the name, though. I've just registered "chatandslash.com" as a backup that I can switch to before too much marketing has gone forward, and I've already emailed Slack again to show them what I've come up with and for further confirmation that what I'm up to is fine and dandy before progressing any further. Oh, and you're totally right about shimming out Slack with my own frontend. It's in the backlog of stuff to do some day potentially, but I think there's a lot to be gained in the meantime by explicitly staying with Slack in the meantime. "An RPG you play in Slack" is a lot more interesting than "An RPG that looks kinda like chat, I guess". Thanks for the advice!

mi100hael 10y ago

There's a perfect alternative: * Free * Handles thousands of users seamlessly * Archived via bot same as free Slack * No noticeable performance hit for high user volumes * Wide variety of interfaces and integration bots to choose from * Widely deployed and trusted across tech communities It's called IRC. Edit: I can tell more people are encountering challenges using Slack these days. In the past, a suggestion to use IRC would have been downvoted to hell and back! A lot of people seem hung up on the history, file sharing, or some other feature that Slack has, so I thought I'd take a moment to expand on my ideal setup and how they translate from Slack: * Long-lived documentation and important team knowledge: Wiki pages (which I prefer even when using Slack and pins or history search are available). Full history of edits is visible and it's easy to access/search. * Discussions involving a large number of stakeholders: Email. Threads and the async nature of the protocol make it well-suited to discussions when users aren't all online at the same time and the discussion is more thoughtful and isn't moving quickly. Slack threads suck replies aren't very visible and history scrolls quickly in active channels. * Discussions involving outages, current tasks, and other immediate needs: IRC. It's real time, cross-platform, etc. History can be archived for later searching, but CHAT HISOTRY != DOCUMENTATION. Post-mortems and that sort of thing should end up in a wiki or similar. * File sharing can be done via some other service with a link pasted into chat. One extra step to paste the link manually isn't a big deal.

ATsch 10y ago
It's a shame there has not been an easy, free way to solve the major problems with IRC for everybody: - no history while you are not in a channel - lack of modern features like sending images and lack of good UX - no mobile notifications Matrix.org solves these problems very well IMO, but it's adoption is abysmal too.
- lorenzhs 10y ago
  All of these problems are solvable, though: - Commonly addressed with logging bots and a link to the log in the topic - Some clients have this: when you drag an image into Glowing Bear (a web frontend for WeeChat that I'm working on), it gets uploaded to imgur and a link to the image is pasted in the channel. It can also display images and videos inline if you wish. - Easily handled with services like push{over,bullet} The problem is that these things don't work out of the box and that there's a learning curve. It's just not a very friendly experience for newcomers.

altern8tif 10y ago

This has been a sore point for many communities (see the Digital Nomads + React communities). But if Slack were smart about it, they'll realise that there's an opportunity here. They are a very well-funded company and it wouldn't hurt to spend some resources to beef up their current code/infrastructure or to even spin up a separate product that they can profit from.

nottorp 10y ago

Speaking of Slack, what's an alternative with a different pricing model? We have a core team that's always around, and for that Slack pricing is fine, but we have a significant number of "drive by" users that aren't worth paying $60 per year. We're generally happy with Slack's features, so which are the similar services that charge something different than per-user?

jjawssd 10y ago
Mattermost is a complete replacement for Slack. I really don't understand why people use Slack if they don't use the integrations, which in my opinion are quite unnecessary in many cases.

Nomentatus 10y ago

Like the author, I'm always "that guy" who plays a game or uses a program in a way that seems reasonable, or optimal to me (and often is very efficient) but is so unusual that the program eventually "falls off the edge of the world" and starts crashing all over the place because none of the beta-testers ever did anything quite like what I'm doing with the program. Like this guy, I usually don't know at first just what is so unusual about my behavior, and often I never do find out. My favorite game (not yet a decade old) crashes every several minutes for me, playing the way I like. I just save extremely frequently and keep right on playing it. The moral: Where business is concerned: "Be a smart herder" - don't make any false moves, or adopt odd implementations or uses of key software products (or software controlled products) because the minute your behavior is similar to only 1/1000 users (sometimes 1/100 users), you are using the equivalent of an alpha or beta product, and you should count on getting zero product support. Your complaints will, likely, not even be properly comprehended or will be understood, but labeled "impossible" and abruptly closed (I'm looking at you Open Office.)