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Wow, Slack does not allow business customers to export their chats. WTF. Found this: "Workspace Owners can apply for Corporate Export. This lets you export all

Wow, Slack does not allow business customers to export their chats. WTF. Found this: "Workspace Owners can apply for Corporate Export. This lets you export all messages (including DMs and private channels), but only if your company has legal or compliance requirements and Slack approves the request. Once approved, exports are scheduled and delivered automatically." So they have the tech built, you just aren't allowed to use it. Who would use this piece of garbage?

artursapek 1y ago
Big soulless corps inevitably get greedy. It’s pretty depressing
cj 1y ago
The application process is a short form and a few clicks. They don't have a high bar for being accepted.
userbinator 1y ago
IMHO "allow" is a rather moot term, when you already have access. Their API is surprisingly well-documented; when I worked at a place that used Slack, I had a logger hooked up to a local database, which was very useful when their not-quite-search failed to give any results for a comment that you and others very clearly remember making.
- edoceo 1y ago
  Yes. If you use Slack, make your own archive. I, I just have to mention that IRC had these archives so repeat questions had a corpus to search. The walled gardens don't. For my teams the "modern" solution is Mattermost. My (biased) feelings are that it's 10x better than free-slack and 100x better than paid.
  - MontyCarloHall 1y ago
    >IRC had these archives so repeat questions had a corpus to search It did? I used IRC pretty frequently back in the day, and the only logging I ever saw was through your own client. This was in the days of dialup, so you'd miss any conversations from when you weren't logged in. If you were fancy, you'd have a bouncer set up on an always-on remote server to log messages when you were away. But I never saw any centralized logging à la Slack/Teams/Mattermost. It's certainly not something supported by any IRCd I'm aware of. Maybe a few channels had custom bots that logged everything to a centrally searchable location, but I never saw such a thing. Indeed, some here even tout the "ephemeral nature of IRC as a feature, not a bug." [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32000415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32000415
    - skydhash 1y ago
      The ephemeral is indeed a bug. Anything important should be saved somewhere else (notes, decisions, docs, wiki,..) IRC is the same as watercooler or quick group meeting, no one brings a recorder to have everything on file.
    - edoceo 1y ago
      Friend, back in the day many email and IRC rooms were archived. I wave my hat to a thing called MARC. One used to use Google (pre-stackoverflow) and see threads from the OGs. And one could find the core-expert lurking. Sometimes you could make a personal connection. I miss the old Internet. And get off my lawn!
    - madaxe_again 1y ago
      You can just run bots. We had one who was responsible for archiving everything so it was searchable, and would allow you to search, another which would allow you to do deployments, and another which complained about severe errors in the critical environments. I still don’t understand what slack can do that IRC and a few bots can’t.
    - userbinator 1y ago
      Plenty of communities kept IRC archives. Here's Ubuntu: https://irclogs.ubuntu.com/ https://irclogs.ubuntu.com/
  - commandar 1y ago
    >I just have to mention that IRC had these archives so repeat questions had a corpus to search. The walled gardens don't. For many businesses, this is a feature, not a bug. Internal communications are discoverable in litigation. If you have records, you can be compelled to turn them over. I used to work in healthcare. Internal messages had a maximum retention of 30 days. That wasn't driven by IT or the users. That was a decision made by legal. In that space, you are always being sued by somebody. The lawyers want to minimize exposure and that's a fight they're basically always going to win. To be clear: it's better if that's a decision made by the business. But it's also one of those cases where what the decision makers care about isn't necessarily aligned with what the users care about, so there's ultimately not a lot of incentive for Slack to care.
smelendez 1y ago
Makes some sense to me. In some cases, as Slack says, there may be a legal mandate to log employee conversations, but in other situations there may be legal restrictions on reading employee-to-employee conversations. That all probably varies by jurisdiction. And then you have more complicated situations, like companies that use Slack to offer tech support to their customers, or random open-source projects or local volunteer projects using Slack. They might pay for a business license for various features, but it's probably not clear to every member that that would mean whoever set up the Slack account should get to read everyone else's correspondence. You also want some kind of safety check to make sure that a random IT guy who set up the Slack system at a small company isn't reading through people's DMs and private channels to stalk people or access confidential information.
- notpushkin 1y ago
  Yeah, but exporting public channels shouldn’t be a problem, no?
  - smelendez 1y ago
    And that's allowed under all plans: https://slack.com/help/articles/201658943-Export-your-workspace-data https://slack.com/help/articles/201658943-Export-your-worksp...
    - notpushkin 1y ago
      Nice! I’d say most of the knowledge can be preserved that way then. (But I would also start making backups regularly, because who knows if how long this would last)
- ejstronge 1y ago
  > but in other situations there may be legal restrictions on reading employee-to-employee conversations. In which US jurisdictions can employee-to-employee records (from employer-owned communication media) be denied to the employer/customer but maintained by an unrelated third party?
Kirth 1y ago
Let's be honest; how many Slack messages or conversations older than 2-3 weeks still have value?
- dzhiurgis 1y ago
  Slacks biggest value is ephemeral nature. Forces you to document in proper places.
- JambalayaJimbo 1y ago
  Slack is the first place I search for any issue at my company and I frequently take advantage of 3-4 year old threads
- joshstrange 1y ago
  95% might have little value or zero but 5% of them are gold, it’s just not always clear which 5% is the gold until you need it.
- mitthrowaway2 1y ago
  In BC, engineering firms are legally required to maintain project documentation for 10 years, including slack messages.
- novatea 1y ago
  In Hack Club, a lot. I'm a teen in HC, many projects run for months and have very valuable messages for a long time.
  - p-t 1y ago
    Adding on to this, a lot of people don't want their personal chats deleted either!
- layman51 1y ago
  I'm actually part of some Slack workspaces that are on the free plan which hides messages (including DMs) older than 90 days. It is actually quite cumbersome then because if someone sends a valuable message, I have to remember to screenshot or better yet copy-paste it into a durable spot or else I'm going to have to ask again about the same thing.
coder543 1y ago
Zulip wrote a fun article about this a couple of months ago: https://blog.zulip.com/2025/07/24/who-owns-your-slack-history/ https://blog.zulip.com/2025/07/24/who-owns-your-slack-histor...
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
nbngeorcjhe 1y ago
> only if your company has legal or compliance requirements clearly they need to sue themselves and demand their slack history in discovery
Cort3z 1y ago
Makes some sense that the owner can't just eavesdrop on every conversation on the platform. That is very illegal many places in the world.
- bux93 1y ago
  In 30 places, it's also very illegal to do business with vendors who ransom your data, if you're in finance, i.e. an entity covered by the Digital Operational Resilience Act; NIS2 (27 places) doesn't spell it out but also requires business continuity planning. Natural persons in the EU+EEA also retain a right to data portability under GDPR and there are data access/portability provisions in the EU Data ACT and DMA. Many legal frameworks require the covered entity to be 'in control' of vendors and data. Proactive legalese allowing the vendor to ransom your data is not quite in line with that requirement; in many sane jurisdictions such clauses would be found unenforceable.

artursapek 1y ago

Big soulless corps inevitably get greedy. It’s pretty depressing

cj 1y ago

The application process is a short form and a few clicks. They don't have a high bar for being accepted.

userbinator 1y ago

IMHO "allow" is a rather moot term, when you already have access. Their API is surprisingly well-documented; when I worked at a place that used Slack, I had a logger hooked up to a local database, which was very useful when their not-quite-search failed to give any results for a comment that you and others very clearly remember making.

edoceo 1y ago
Yes. If you use Slack, make your own archive. I, I just have to mention that IRC had these archives so repeat questions had a corpus to search. The walled gardens don't. For my teams the "modern" solution is Mattermost. My (biased) feelings are that it's 10x better than free-slack and 100x better than paid.
- MontyCarloHall 1y ago
  >IRC had these archives so repeat questions had a corpus to search It did? I used IRC pretty frequently back in the day, and the only logging I ever saw was through your own client. This was in the days of dialup, so you'd miss any conversations from when you weren't logged in. If you were fancy, you'd have a bouncer set up on an always-on remote server to log messages when you were away. But I never saw any centralized logging à la Slack/Teams/Mattermost. It's certainly not something supported by any IRCd I'm aware of. Maybe a few channels had custom bots that logged everything to a centrally searchable location, but I never saw such a thing. Indeed, some here even tout the "ephemeral nature of IRC as a feature, not a bug." [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32000415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32000415
  - skydhash 1y ago
    The ephemeral is indeed a bug. Anything important should be saved somewhere else (notes, decisions, docs, wiki,..) IRC is the same as watercooler or quick group meeting, no one brings a recorder to have everything on file.
  - edoceo 1y ago
    Friend, back in the day many email and IRC rooms were archived. I wave my hat to a thing called MARC. One used to use Google (pre-stackoverflow) and see threads from the OGs. And one could find the core-expert lurking. Sometimes you could make a personal connection. I miss the old Internet. And get off my lawn!
  - madaxe_again 1y ago
    You can just run bots. We had one who was responsible for archiving everything so it was searchable, and would allow you to search, another which would allow you to do deployments, and another which complained about severe errors in the critical environments. I still don’t understand what slack can do that IRC and a few bots can’t.
  - userbinator 1y ago
    Plenty of communities kept IRC archives. Here's Ubuntu: https://irclogs.ubuntu.com/ https://irclogs.ubuntu.com/
- commandar 1y ago
  >I just have to mention that IRC had these archives so repeat questions had a corpus to search. The walled gardens don't. For many businesses, this is a feature, not a bug. Internal communications are discoverable in litigation. If you have records, you can be compelled to turn them over. I used to work in healthcare. Internal messages had a maximum retention of 30 days. That wasn't driven by IT or the users. That was a decision made by legal. In that space, you are always being sued by somebody. The lawyers want to minimize exposure and that's a fight they're basically always going to win. To be clear: it's better if that's a decision made by the business. But it's also one of those cases where what the decision makers care about isn't necessarily aligned with what the users care about, so there's ultimately not a lot of incentive for Slack to care.

smelendez 1y ago

Makes some sense to me. In some cases, as Slack says, there may be a legal mandate to log employee conversations, but in other situations there may be legal restrictions on reading employee-to-employee conversations. That all probably varies by jurisdiction. And then you have more complicated situations, like companies that use Slack to offer tech support to their customers, or random open-source projects or local volunteer projects using Slack. They might pay for a business license for various features, but it's probably not clear to every member that that would mean whoever set up the Slack account should get to read everyone else's correspondence. You also want some kind of safety check to make sure that a random IT guy who set up the Slack system at a small company isn't reading through people's DMs and private channels to stalk people or access confidential information.

notpushkin 1y ago
Yeah, but exporting public channels shouldn’t be a problem, no?
- smelendez 1y ago
  And that's allowed under all plans: https://slack.com/help/articles/201658943-Export-your-workspace-data https://slack.com/help/articles/201658943-Export-your-worksp...
  - notpushkin 1y ago
    Nice! I’d say most of the knowledge can be preserved that way then. (But I would also start making backups regularly, because who knows if how long this would last)
ejstronge 1y ago
> but in other situations there may be legal restrictions on reading employee-to-employee conversations. In which US jurisdictions can employee-to-employee records (from employer-owned communication media) be denied to the employer/customer but maintained by an unrelated third party?

Kirth 1y ago

Let's be honest; how many Slack messages or conversations older than 2-3 weeks still have value?

dzhiurgis 1y ago
Slacks biggest value is ephemeral nature. Forces you to document in proper places.
JambalayaJimbo 1y ago
Slack is the first place I search for any issue at my company and I frequently take advantage of 3-4 year old threads
joshstrange 1y ago
95% might have little value or zero but 5% of them are gold, it’s just not always clear which 5% is the gold until you need it.
mitthrowaway2 1y ago
In BC, engineering firms are legally required to maintain project documentation for 10 years, including slack messages.
novatea 1y ago
In Hack Club, a lot. I'm a teen in HC, many projects run for months and have very valuable messages for a long time.
- p-t 1y ago
  Adding on to this, a lot of people don't want their personal chats deleted either!
layman51 1y ago
I'm actually part of some Slack workspaces that are on the free plan which hides messages (including DMs) older than 90 days. It is actually quite cumbersome then because if someone sends a valuable message, I have to remember to screenshot or better yet copy-paste it into a durable spot or else I'm going to have to ask again about the same thing.

coder543 1y ago

Zulip wrote a fun article about this a couple of months ago: https://blog.zulip.com/2025/07/24/who-owns-your-slack-history/ https://blog.zulip.com/2025/07/24/who-owns-your-slack-histor...

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

nbngeorcjhe 1y ago

> only if your company has legal or compliance requirements clearly they need to sue themselves and demand their slack history in discovery

Cort3z 1y ago

Makes some sense that the owner can't just eavesdrop on every conversation on the platform. That is very illegal many places in the world.

bux93 1y ago
In 30 places, it's also very illegal to do business with vendors who ransom your data, if you're in finance, i.e. an entity covered by the Digital Operational Resilience Act; NIS2 (27 places) doesn't spell it out but also requires business continuity planning. Natural persons in the EU+EEA also retain a right to data portability under GDPR and there are data access/portability provisions in the EU Data ACT and DMA. Many legal frameworks require the covered entity to be 'in control' of vendors and data. Proactive legalese allowing the vendor to ransom your data is not quite in line with that requirement; in many sane jurisdictions such clauses would be found unenforceable.