I was recently pissed off at seeing how many open source projects use Slack despite so many issues with it.[1] Like others have mentioned, I tried several chat

I was recently pissed off at seeing how many open source projects use Slack despite so many issues with it.[1] Like others have mentioned, I tried several chat clients (open source and non-open source) and realized none of them fit the bill/don't have the customizability that I wanted. So, as stupid/crazy as this sounds, I sat down over a weekend, wrote a simple chat app on Phoenix/Elixir, hosted it on Google Cloud AppEngine, and Bingo! We were done. I know many people will advise against this, but: 1) I'm not into devops, so this setup works really well for me since AppEngine is precisely meant for this. 2) AppEngine allows you to setup firewall rules within their interface, so I restricted access to the outside world and whitelisted only my company's IP. So, I don't really need to worry about security much. 3) Because, this is a custom solution, I was able to integrate stuff such as time tracking, verifying that confidential docs aren't shared between teams, etc. Also, our own custom branding, client support integration within the chat (you can answer to support tickets right from within the interface). 4) I enjoyed the experience thoroughly and it integrates with my entire Saas I've developed[2] very, very nicely. Ironically the Phoenix open source project (and similar others) themselves use Slack (why god, why?) and it's really terrible because Slack doesn't allow you to search for more than 10,000 messages. That's the last thing you want in an open source project - the inability to search for solutions / snippets of code. Hope they move it else where or did what I did. [1]http://sircmpwn.github.io/2015/11/01/Please-stop-using-slack.html http://sircmpwn.github.io/2015/11/01/Please-stop-using-slack... [2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14785209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14785209