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What’s the difference between a Zulip topic and a Slack channel? Certainly, having one big #engineering Slack channel is unproductive (hundreds of people intera

What’s the difference between a Zulip topic and a Slack channel? Certainly, having one big #engineering Slack channel is unproductive (hundreds of people interacting)… but who’s stopping you from creating #engineering-utc-9 for the people who require it? Put it in another way, what prevents us from using Zulip topics the “wrong way”?

usr1106 4y ago
What would be the purpose of #engineering-utc-9? Normally disussions go around some topic and those who are interested or have a contribution don't necessarily work in the same time zone. Yor suggestion would only be relevant if a problem needs to solved now or never. Or for a completely useless chitchat channel that people follow only realtime but nobody would ever read and reply to afterwards.
usr1106 4y ago
We use zulip at work (yes, heavy geek influence:) ). Nothing except social pressure prevents people from misusing topics. It happens to all of us, when a different thread gets spawned during a discussion. Sometimes when someone does not know where a question or bug would belong to. But you can move the messages in question to a suitable topic (existing or new) at any time. That used to be a bit buggy in the past, but has been working smoothly for a couple of releases. Within the same zulip stream everyone can do it (in theory causing edit wars, but it has never happened in our company). To move it to a different stream, you need to be admin. That's sometimes a bit weird, but our admin is quick to do it when discussions went offtopic. Edit: I can't answer why it was worse in Slack. Luckily I haven't had to use Slack for 4 years. I only remember that it was much worse. Wasn't it so in Slack the user replying explicitly needed to select a threaded reply (and few did so). And even if they had done so, the one coming to work 8 or 24 hours later needed to look through everything (or nothing) because the (possibly threaded) messages had no topic?

usr1106 4y ago

What would be the purpose of #engineering-utc-9? Normally disussions go around some topic and those who are interested or have a contribution don't necessarily work in the same time zone. Yor suggestion would only be relevant if a problem needs to solved now or never. Or for a completely useless chitchat channel that people follow only realtime but nobody would ever read and reply to afterwards.

usr1106 4y ago

We use zulip at work (yes, heavy geek influence:) ). Nothing except social pressure prevents people from misusing topics. It happens to all of us, when a different thread gets spawned during a discussion. Sometimes when someone does not know where a question or bug would belong to. But you can move the messages in question to a suitable topic (existing or new) at any time. That used to be a bit buggy in the past, but has been working smoothly for a couple of releases. Within the same zulip stream everyone can do it (in theory causing edit wars, but it has never happened in our company). To move it to a different stream, you need to be admin. That's sometimes a bit weird, but our admin is quick to do it when discussions went offtopic. Edit: I can't answer why it was worse in Slack. Luckily I haven't had to use Slack for 4 years. I only remember that it was much worse. Wasn't it so in Slack the user replying explicitly needed to select a threaded reply (and few did so). And even if they had done so, the one coming to work 8 or 24 hours later needed to look through everything (or nothing) because the (possibly threaded) messages had no topic?