[sword-devel] Possibility of using Slack

[Greg Hellings]

On Thu, Jun 28, 2018 at 3:10 PM Daniel Bennett <danbenn at umich.edu> wrote:

> Totally understand. Slack is not a great solution in that case.
>
> How about Gitter? It’s basically a modern IRC.
>

The power of inertia is strong. Doubt you'll be able to move people.


>
> To get on this list, I had to personally reach out to Troy, because the
> email list was (and is) blocking new people from joining. Not exactly
> public and open.
>

The archives are public. Everything on the list is open. Membership is
moderated to control spam, yes, but that doesn't make it less open or
public. We would probably have to do the same thing on any chat medium (We
do it on IRC from time to time. The nature of our target subjects attracts
a fair amount of trolling.)


> Also, the Freenode channel doesn’t preserve message history. And, the last
> two times I asked for help, no one responded. Gitter preserves all message
> history, which is good.
>

Most clients maintain channel history. And there are ways to keep the logs
stored publicly, if someone thought that was necessary.
https://freenode.logbot.info/ for instance.

No one responding is not going to change if you move from IRC to Slack.
That's a function of both the nature of this project (largely dormant in
terms of code development, until a bug or necessary feature request appears
- the code is very old, very mature, and very stable and needs little in
the way of updating) and the nature of the people who participate in chat
channels. Moving to Slack holds almost no chance of changing either of
those things.

For a project like this, chat channels are simply not the best medium to
get help. Trolling through the mailing list archives for the almost
guaranteed previous person to ask the question, and firing it off
asynchronously if the question is the rare one that hasn't previously been
asked is probably always going to be your best avenue for help. The #sword
channel in IRC is not meant for real-time user help, and neither is this
list for that matter. They are both intended for developer communications.


> Anything that can reduce barriers to people giving and receiving help
> would be nice!
>

If it's in your desire, go ahead and open a Slack channel. There's nothing
stopping you. But it's unlikely that you'll see much traffic across it. IRC
works just great for the needs of developer communication on this project
and with current project leadership that is unlikely to change.

--Greg


>
> On Jun 28, 2018 at 3:53 PM, Greg Hellings <greg.hellings at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> It sounds like that's the exact opposite of what we want. We want the
> communication to be public and open, not private and closed.
>
> Also: what service spent much of yesterday offline? Hint: not Freenode,
> which is where we currently have our developer chat.
>
> --Greg
>
> On Thu, Jun 28, 2018 at 2:31 PM Daniel Bennett <danbenn at umich.edu> wrote:
>
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> Just wanted to float the possibility of creating a Slack group for sword
>> development?
>>
>> If you haven’t seen Slack, it’s a group messaging service, which gives
>> you control over notifications.
>>
>> It’s private, secure, and requires minimal personal information.
>>
>> Hit reply and let me (or the group) know your thoughts!
>>
>> Here’s a screenshot below:
>> [image: Image result for slack screenshots]
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>
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