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I'm not really sure how Slack saving documents to disk would really make sense. IRC was around before SaaS took off and webapps replaced desktop apps, but I can

I'm not really sure how Slack saving documents to disk would really make sense. IRC was around before SaaS took off and webapps replaced desktop apps, but I can't think of a client that implemented "IRC documents" saved to disk. Sure, most clients let you automatically save logs, but they were just text files you opened in any text editor. They weren't in a special IRC format, and you didn't open them with your IRC client. Hell, you couldn't open them with your IRC client. There's no reason you can't just ctrl-C a bunch of stuff out of a Slack chat and ctrl-V it into your text editor. Only difference between that and IRC logging is that you have to do it manually.

enriquto 5y ago
> they were just text files you opened in any text editor. They weren't in a special IRC format Of course they are! Using anything other than text files to store chat logs would be idiotic. The main point is that slack is a user-hostile application that does not even allow you to do that. Why people put up with this is beyond me.
nexuist 5y ago
> Sure, most clients let you automatically save logs, but they were just text files you opened in any text editor. Right, my point is why doesn't Slack do that? Then you could use `grep` or `find` to search across all your messages and avoid paying a monthly fee to access your entire message history and...oh, right.
- onion2k 5y ago
  You can only search a log for the time that you were logged in and saving it. You can search the entire history of many Slack channels from the very first message posted in it onwards, even before you'd ever joined it. That's a significant advantage over a local file. I'm not particularly keen on Slack but suggesting search would be better locally is plain silly. Search is obviously better done at the server.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    > You can only search a log for the time that you were logged in and saving it. That ignores the possibility of the data being synced between local system and the server. Slack is already in the cloud, so cloud options are on the table. And so is syncing data. > suggesting search would be better locally is plain silly. Search is obviously better done at the server. The reverse is obvious to me. Slack search, like all web SaaS search tools, is really bad. I could do better with grep - and it would work faster, and I could actually trust that it searches through all the messages, instead of giving me some eventually-consistent view into results of a query that is only tangentially related to what I requested. And they wouldn't be able to tell me which properties I can or can not search by. And I'm not talking theory - in the past, I did some spelunking in many years' worth of IRC logs in a folder on my drive, and the experience was much better than searching for anything in Slack.
TeMPOraL 5y ago
> Sure, most clients let you automatically save logs, but they were just text files you opened in any text editor. They weren't in a special IRC format, and you didn't open them with your IRC client. Yes, that's exactly the point. You owned this data, you could do whatever you wanted with it, and it was stored in a format that was both trivial and most fitting for the data stored. > Hell, you couldn't open them with your IRC client. I'm pretty sure you could in some clients, and some definitely pulled stored logs to backfill the chat after restart. Though I haven't done that myself (instead I relied on a bouncer to supply the backlog on connection). > There's no reason you can't just ctrl-C a bunch of stuff out of a Slack chat and ctrl-V it into your text editor. Only difference between that and IRC logging is that you have to do it manually. That's a world of a difference. In Slack, it's painful to do, and if you haven't done it when you first saw a message, it's going to be even more painful to do after the fact.

enriquto 5y ago

> they were just text files you opened in any text editor. They weren't in a special IRC format Of course they are! Using anything other than text files to store chat logs would be idiotic. The main point is that slack is a user-hostile application that does not even allow you to do that. Why people put up with this is beyond me.

nexuist 5y ago

> Sure, most clients let you automatically save logs, but they were just text files you opened in any text editor. Right, my point is why doesn't Slack do that? Then you could use `grep` or `find` to search across all your messages and avoid paying a monthly fee to access your entire message history and...oh, right.

onion2k 5y ago
You can only search a log for the time that you were logged in and saving it. You can search the entire history of many Slack channels from the very first message posted in it onwards, even before you'd ever joined it. That's a significant advantage over a local file. I'm not particularly keen on Slack but suggesting search would be better locally is plain silly. Search is obviously better done at the server.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  > You can only search a log for the time that you were logged in and saving it. That ignores the possibility of the data being synced between local system and the server. Slack is already in the cloud, so cloud options are on the table. And so is syncing data. > suggesting search would be better locally is plain silly. Search is obviously better done at the server. The reverse is obvious to me. Slack search, like all web SaaS search tools, is really bad. I could do better with grep - and it would work faster, and I could actually trust that it searches through all the messages, instead of giving me some eventually-consistent view into results of a query that is only tangentially related to what I requested. And they wouldn't be able to tell me which properties I can or can not search by. And I'm not talking theory - in the past, I did some spelunking in many years' worth of IRC logs in a folder on my drive, and the experience was much better than searching for anything in Slack.

TeMPOraL 5y ago

> Sure, most clients let you automatically save logs, but they were just text files you opened in any text editor. They weren't in a special IRC format, and you didn't open them with your IRC client. Yes, that's exactly the point. You owned this data, you could do whatever you wanted with it, and it was stored in a format that was both trivial and most fitting for the data stored. > Hell, you couldn't open them with your IRC client. I'm pretty sure you could in some clients, and some definitely pulled stored logs to backfill the chat after restart. Though I haven't done that myself (instead I relied on a bouncer to supply the backlog on connection). > There's no reason you can't just ctrl-C a bunch of stuff out of a Slack chat and ctrl-V it into your text editor. Only difference between that and IRC logging is that you have to do it manually. That's a world of a difference. In Slack, it's painful to do, and if you haven't done it when you first saw a message, it's going to be even more painful to do after the fact.