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Does Slack's terms of use forbidden creating an off platform archive? If not, given that searchable archives are one of the ways Slack makes money, makes me wo

Does Slack's terms of use forbidden creating an off platform archive? If not, given that searchable archives are one of the ways Slack makes money, makes me wonder why there's not an open source way to pull the chats and archive them in a way that's cheaper and independent of Slack.

pavement 10y ago
forbid creating an off platform archive I'm not sure that's a substantively enforceable idea. Just try and stop me?
- Filligree 10y ago
  Break the terms of service, and you'll be booted off. Be a large enough problem, as they see it, and you'll get the entire project booted off. Probably they don't care enough to enforce, but surely you see it's part of the problem that they could?
  - pavement 10y ago
    Right, but they do still permit the capacity to read accessible history, which is open to scraping and archiving. They can't completely kill the concept of doing that, realistically. They can't stop someone from creating an archive that's inaccessible to them, if they don't know of its existense. Anyone can create an archive of something they can read and hide it, and selectively share it. Such an agreement on curtails specific forms of automated crawling and public-facing archives.
cortesoft 10y ago
Like http://slackarchive.io/ http://slackarchive.io/?
- wonderous 10y ago
  Is an example of a third-party archiving chat, though doesn't appear to be open source; possible it is though, but if it I'm unable to find the code.
ska 10y ago
The problem isn't creating an archive, it is a) synchronizing the archive properly to account for your feeds connectivity issues, and b) providing the archive usefully once it gets large and/or popular (a) is fiddly and a bit technical but has been solved-ish for ages before slack existed (b) is fundamental though. If it's a big archive, it costs real money to provide access & search to. If you break it up, search-ability tends to suffer. None of this is new, slack is just the latest flavor
abalashov 10y ago
Yes, but chat logs are logs of ... chat. By nature, it's disorganised, free-wheeling, contains lots of casual meandering (as any conversation would). Not very useful to a third party. How often do you find solutions in public archived mailing list posts when Googling problems? I imagine often. While some e-mails are more terse than others, fundamentally e-mail list posts demand a certain structure. Can you imagine having to pour through a 25-page chat log instead? And with that, the entire idea of "search the archives before asking a question" would go to pot.
- ornitorrincos 10y ago
  I did find some gems on irc logs, but I agree, they should be treated as snooping on conversations

pavement 10y ago

forbid creating an off platform archive I'm not sure that's a substantively enforceable idea. Just try and stop me?

Filligree 10y ago
Break the terms of service, and you'll be booted off. Be a large enough problem, as they see it, and you'll get the entire project booted off. Probably they don't care enough to enforce, but surely you see it's part of the problem that they could?
- pavement 10y ago
  Right, but they do still permit the capacity to read accessible history, which is open to scraping and archiving. They can't completely kill the concept of doing that, realistically. They can't stop someone from creating an archive that's inaccessible to them, if they don't know of its existense. Anyone can create an archive of something they can read and hide it, and selectively share it. Such an agreement on curtails specific forms of automated crawling and public-facing archives.

cortesoft 10y ago

Like http://slackarchive.io/ http://slackarchive.io/?

wonderous 10y ago
Is an example of a third-party archiving chat, though doesn't appear to be open source; possible it is though, but if it I'm unable to find the code.

ska 10y ago

The problem isn't creating an archive, it is a) synchronizing the archive properly to account for your feeds connectivity issues, and b) providing the archive usefully once it gets large and/or popular (a) is fiddly and a bit technical but has been solved-ish for ages before slack existed (b) is fundamental though. If it's a big archive, it costs real money to provide access & search to. If you break it up, search-ability tends to suffer. None of this is new, slack is just the latest flavor

abalashov 10y ago

Yes, but chat logs are logs of ... chat. By nature, it's disorganised, free-wheeling, contains lots of casual meandering (as any conversation would). Not very useful to a third party. How often do you find solutions in public archived mailing list posts when Googling problems? I imagine often. While some e-mails are more terse than others, fundamentally e-mail list posts demand a certain structure. Can you imagine having to pour through a 25-page chat log instead? And with that, the entire idea of "search the archives before asking a question" would go to pot.

ornitorrincos 10y ago
I did find some gems on irc logs, but I agree, they should be treated as snooping on conversations