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Supposedly this feature is being walked back now. I just received the following from their support. I'm ecstatic to hear this and hope their Product Managemen

by sean0- 7y ago

Supposedly this feature is being walked back now. I just received the following from their support. I'm ecstatic to hear this and hope their Product Management has reassessed the importance of non-WYSIWYG inputs. >>> We really appreciate your feedback, and we hear your frustration. We're sorry for the impact this is having on your ability to communicate with your team and on your overall productivity. We made a mistake by forcing everyone into this feature without providing an opt-out for customers like you: people for whom the existing behavior was working just fine. We've started working on a preference that will let you return to the previous message composer. We don't have a specific release date to share right now — it's this team's top and only priority, however, and we expect to have it available on the desktop within a couple of weeks, with Android following shortly thereafter. We will follow up with another note when this option is available to you, and we'll include instructions on how to enable it. Again, we're sorry for the disruption and we're grateful for the feedback. We missed the mark on this feature! We will do our best to learn from this and avoid similar mistakes in the future.

aclelland 7y ago
Just for anyone who'd like some confirmation of this. Their official Twitter account it's also saying the same[1] I'm glad they listened to the feedback but their attitude towards people who wrote in with bugs/criticism should also be learned from. Being told 'We know what's best for you, we're not reverting the changes' was pretty insulting. [1] https://mobile.twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/1197640136172937218 https://mobile.twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/119764013617293721...
- xfitm3 7y ago
  It's extremely insulting and this is why I think Slack is hostile towards its users.
- AceyMan 7y ago
  And in more than one place, viz., https://mobile.twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/1197648199990857728 https://mobile.twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/119764819999085772... And something that occurred to me: if it's true that "in the future everyone will code (to some degree)," don't you think it's OK to start the baby steps of textual thinking? C'mon, it's markup with like six modes, people. Practice for half as long as you're on <time_wasting_social_app> in one day and you'll be fluent.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
    > Practice for half as long as you're on <time_wasting_social_app> in one day and you'll be fluent. To be fair, you could learn almost anything in that amount of time;)
ajacksified 7y ago
I just got the same copy sent to me. Our collective rage is working
- hackerm0nkey 7y ago
  yup, got the same reply back as well. Glad that our voice was heard
_bxg1 7y ago
Shocking to hear them be so responsive, given their track record. It took them five (!) years to implement dark mode from when people started publicly asking for it. I guess a walk-back is different from a new feature, but still, this isn't the first change they've made that's upset people who they've then proceeded to ignore.
- scaryclam 7y ago
  I think the difference here is that paying customers have threatened to walk away.
kenrose 7y ago
Can confirm. I got the same reply as well from their support team.
lovehashbrowns 7y ago
First off, that's super good to hear. Secondly, I'm absolutely flabbergasted that this reaction wasn't obvious to them from the get-go. This isn't the first time some silly addition of a wysiwyg feature has ended in outrage. What's even more astounding is that I don't think there are many features as despised as wysiwyg. It's up there with comic sans. Why make your entire UI revolve around one of the most despised features in the UX world?
- arrrg 7y ago
  How did you come to the conclusion that WYSIWYG are “one of the most despised features in the UX world”? That seems completely unfounded to me. WYSIWYG editors can be extremely bad … but millions of people use WYSIWYG editors all the time and wouldn’t ever think of exchanging them for plaintext editors with Markdown or something like that. You comment seems completely disconnected from any semblance of reality.
  - Aeolun 7y ago
    Just because millions of people use WYSIWYG editors every day, does not mean that they don’t absolutely despise it. I haven’t ever heard anyone comment on how enjoyable Word is to use.
    - nnq 7y ago
      ...Word doesn't at the same time allow markdown input and autoformats it impredictibly! If you know how bad Word is (or was, haven't touched it in a while), imagine how bad a Word version with multimodal input would be!
      - naravara 7y ago
        >Word doesn't at the same time allow markdown input and autoformats it impredictibly! Word can't even auto-format plain text input predictably. If you try anything at all complex involving spacing our outline formats it gets completely turned around.
    - 7y ago
jv22222 7y ago
Now, if only Atlassian could solve "CLOUD-7184: More Easily Change Atlassian/JIRA Cloud URL Domain" https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CLOUD-7184 https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CLOUD-7184 With 740 companies asking for it ;) Submitted in 2014.
- huckyaus 7y ago
  Microsoft has only just implemented (in preview) the ability to change the name/URL of your SharePoint site[0], a feature that has been widely requested for well over a decade. Atlassian users might have a while to wait yet :-) [0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/change-site-address https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/change-site-addr...
- georgebarnett 7y ago
  Theres a note on the ticket that domain renames can be requested via support and this process does work - I've tried it on my own site :) I've had some visibility of the internals of this work and it has involved touching a very large number of systems across a lot of teams. If you're interested in this issue, do also follow CLOUD-6999 which tracks custom domains and has a number of updates which are related.
jsjohnst 7y ago
Funny how different the response I got from them yesterday versus what you got today. “Not in our roadmap to have an option to go back” is rather dramatically different. Power of outcry I guess, I’ll take it!
- robert_tweed 7y ago
  I wonder if this article being on the front page of HN for so long had a direct impact? To put the scale of the outrage into context, this is one of the most upvoted articles since the MacOS High Sierra "log in as root by typing no password" bug. That one got a total of 3000 points. At the time of this comment, this is still on the front page with over 2.6k and counting. It's already surpassed the news of Julian Assange's arrest, which fell slightly short of 2.4k.
pwm 7y ago
Yup, I got the exact same reply. There is hope after all.
capableweb 7y ago
> it's this team's top and only priority, however, and we expect to have it available on the desktop within a couple of weeks, with Android following shortly thereafter Does this seem unreasonably long? I get that large corps have longer development time, but wouldn't this be behind a internal feature toggle anyways? How do they deploy versions really? Did they already ripped out the code and are unable to go back? They need to rewrite the functionality or something like that? Probably only someone with insight into this specific problem can answer but would be interesting to hear about it...
- _bxg1 7y ago
  Rich text editors are a nightmare to implement, especially on the web, mainly because formatting a substring requires creating a new nested element, so you have to constantly synchronize a flat string with a tree structure. It's possible that they dodged this problem by storing the in-progress message as a tree and just intercepting keyboard events to directly manipulate that. If so, the core data structure would've changed and it might not be a clean swap between two different widgets that both just operate on a string. That's just a guess though; I don't work at Slack.
  - capableweb 7y ago
    Sure, I understand the complexity of implement rich text editors / WYSIWYG. However, when implementing and deploying something like this, you usually put it behind a feature toggle (so, if you have a "text editor" component, you start by extracting old text editor into something like "raw text editor" which "text editor" uses by default. Now you can add "rich text editor" to the "text editor" component, but only if the feature flag is activated) so you can toggle it back/forth as needed.
    - _bxg1 7y ago
      My point is that abstracting things that way may have carried deceptively significant overhead, and if they intended to move everyone to the new editor without a toggle (which they clearly did), they may just gone forward with deep, incompatible changes instead. So now they'd have to go back and re-structure everything to make it modular in that way so that the two versions can coexist.

by sean0- 7y ago

aclelland 7y ago

Just for anyone who'd like some confirmation of this. Their official Twitter account it's also saying the same[1] I'm glad they listened to the feedback but their attitude towards people who wrote in with bugs/criticism should also be learned from. Being told 'We know what's best for you, we're not reverting the changes' was pretty insulting. [1] https://mobile.twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/1197640136172937218 https://mobile.twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/119764013617293721...

xfitm3 7y ago
It's extremely insulting and this is why I think Slack is hostile towards its users.
AceyMan 7y ago
And in more than one place, viz., https://mobile.twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/1197648199990857728 https://mobile.twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/119764819999085772... And something that occurred to me: if it's true that "in the future everyone will code (to some degree)," don't you think it's OK to start the baby steps of textual thinking? C'mon, it's markup with like six modes, people. Practice for half as long as you're on <time_wasting_social_app> in one day and you'll be fluent.
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
  > Practice for half as long as you're on <time_wasting_social_app> in one day and you'll be fluent. To be fair, you could learn almost anything in that amount of time;)

ajacksified 7y ago

I just got the same copy sent to me. Our collective rage is working

hackerm0nkey 7y ago
yup, got the same reply back as well. Glad that our voice was heard

_bxg1 7y ago

Shocking to hear them be so responsive, given their track record. It took them five (!) years to implement dark mode from when people started publicly asking for it. I guess a walk-back is different from a new feature, but still, this isn't the first change they've made that's upset people who they've then proceeded to ignore.

scaryclam 7y ago
I think the difference here is that paying customers have threatened to walk away.

kenrose 7y ago

Can confirm. I got the same reply as well from their support team.

lovehashbrowns 7y ago

First off, that's super good to hear. Secondly, I'm absolutely flabbergasted that this reaction wasn't obvious to them from the get-go. This isn't the first time some silly addition of a wysiwyg feature has ended in outrage. What's even more astounding is that I don't think there are many features as despised as wysiwyg. It's up there with comic sans. Why make your entire UI revolve around one of the most despised features in the UX world?

arrrg 7y ago
How did you come to the conclusion that WYSIWYG are “one of the most despised features in the UX world”? That seems completely unfounded to me. WYSIWYG editors can be extremely bad … but millions of people use WYSIWYG editors all the time and wouldn’t ever think of exchanging them for plaintext editors with Markdown or something like that. You comment seems completely disconnected from any semblance of reality.
- Aeolun 7y ago
  Just because millions of people use WYSIWYG editors every day, does not mean that they don’t absolutely despise it. I haven’t ever heard anyone comment on how enjoyable Word is to use.
  - nnq 7y ago
    ...Word doesn't at the same time allow markdown input and autoformats it impredictibly! If you know how bad Word is (or was, haven't touched it in a while), imagine how bad a Word version with multimodal input would be!
    - naravara 7y ago
      >Word doesn't at the same time allow markdown input and autoformats it impredictibly! Word can't even auto-format plain text input predictably. If you try anything at all complex involving spacing our outline formats it gets completely turned around.
  - 7y ago

jv22222 7y ago

Now, if only Atlassian could solve "CLOUD-7184: More Easily Change Atlassian/JIRA Cloud URL Domain" https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CLOUD-7184 https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CLOUD-7184 With 740 companies asking for it ;) Submitted in 2014.

huckyaus 7y ago
Microsoft has only just implemented (in preview) the ability to change the name/URL of your SharePoint site[0], a feature that has been widely requested for well over a decade. Atlassian users might have a while to wait yet :-) [0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/change-site-address https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/change-site-addr...
georgebarnett 7y ago
Theres a note on the ticket that domain renames can be requested via support and this process does work - I've tried it on my own site :) I've had some visibility of the internals of this work and it has involved touching a very large number of systems across a lot of teams. If you're interested in this issue, do also follow CLOUD-6999 which tracks custom domains and has a number of updates which are related.

jsjohnst 7y ago

Funny how different the response I got from them yesterday versus what you got today. “Not in our roadmap to have an option to go back” is rather dramatically different. Power of outcry I guess, I’ll take it!

robert_tweed 7y ago
I wonder if this article being on the front page of HN for so long had a direct impact? To put the scale of the outrage into context, this is one of the most upvoted articles since the MacOS High Sierra "log in as root by typing no password" bug. That one got a total of 3000 points. At the time of this comment, this is still on the front page with over 2.6k and counting. It's already surpassed the news of Julian Assange's arrest, which fell slightly short of 2.4k.

pwm 7y ago

Yup, I got the exact same reply. There is hope after all.

capableweb 7y ago

> it's this team's top and only priority, however, and we expect to have it available on the desktop within a couple of weeks, with Android following shortly thereafter Does this seem unreasonably long? I get that large corps have longer development time, but wouldn't this be behind a internal feature toggle anyways? How do they deploy versions really? Did they already ripped out the code and are unable to go back? They need to rewrite the functionality or something like that? Probably only someone with insight into this specific problem can answer but would be interesting to hear about it...

_bxg1 7y ago
Rich text editors are a nightmare to implement, especially on the web, mainly because formatting a substring requires creating a new nested element, so you have to constantly synchronize a flat string with a tree structure. It's possible that they dodged this problem by storing the in-progress message as a tree and just intercepting keyboard events to directly manipulate that. If so, the core data structure would've changed and it might not be a clean swap between two different widgets that both just operate on a string. That's just a guess though; I don't work at Slack.
- capableweb 7y ago
  Sure, I understand the complexity of implement rich text editors / WYSIWYG. However, when implementing and deploying something like this, you usually put it behind a feature toggle (so, if you have a "text editor" component, you start by extracting old text editor into something like "raw text editor" which "text editor" uses by default. Now you can add "rich text editor" to the "text editor" component, but only if the feature flag is activated) so you can toggle it back/forth as needed.
  - _bxg1 7y ago
    My point is that abstracting things that way may have carried deceptively significant overhead, and if they intended to move everyone to the new editor without a toggle (which they clearly did), they may just gone forward with deep, incompatible changes instead. So now they'd have to go back and re-structure everything to make it modular in that way so that the two versions can coexist.