Sorry to be devil's advocate here. I have good enough experience with IRC and Slack (used it at places I have worked at).
I would suggest to stay away from Slack. The reason Slack became popular is because of very low learning curve else it works on nearly the same principles as of IRC (sometimes we call it IRC with better UI).
Yes it is filled with features, actually it is crowded with features, and that is what makes it evil in the long run. People will start doing stuff which they don't even need, just because it is easy to do (mostly one click) and then there will be garbage all around, broken flows, useless integrations because everyone will have their own ideas. People like the offline feature but it is another evil. In Slack, when you come online after a small break, you will find plethora of messages flowing in sometimes, because no one cares whether you are online or offline. This develops into shortcut habits of sending messages to people now and then. The loop of offline messages created this kind of momentum for slack, and made it a user habit forming product. This gave it the ability to leverage on the FOMO of people.
For a new user many things are hard to on IRC, and actually it is good, because then they are done only when there is a strong need. This keeps noise low. The list of things I see mentioned above in favour of slack, are features it has in comparison. Unless lack of such features is creating a critical failure in communication and collaboration, it's better to delay the idea till a pressing need comes.
Slack doesn't makes you more productive as compared to IRC, it only makes everyone *feel* more connected.
On Fri, Mar 3, 2017 at 1:19 PM, Michal Čihař michal@cihar.com wrote:
Hi
Manish Bisht píše v Čt 02. 03. 2017 v 21:00 +0530:
Its better for us as:
- Able to message members even when they are not online.
- Integrate Google hangout for calls and video conferencing https://
slack.com/apps/A0F7YS351-google-hangouts 3. Apps Integrations : https://slack.com/apps 4. Code snippets: Slack has built-in support for them. On IRC you’re just asked to use a pastebin like Gist. 5. File transfers: Slack does them. IRC also does them through XDCC, but this can be difficult to get working. 6. Persistent sessions: Slack makes it so that you can see what you missed when you return. With IRC, you don’t have this. If you want it, you can set up an IRC bouncer like ZNC. 5. Integrations: with things like build bots.
Some of them were mentioned on the same link that you have written.
Okay, there are some features we don't need, some which were in IRC for ages (bots), but there are certainly some things which could be useful (offline messaging and session persistence). Do you have experience how does Slack compare to Gitter?
Yes, By default it is invite only. But I have seen that the other organisations have automated it using code. So that the process become similar to subscribing to mailing list. Here is the code and deploying steps available.
First one will be better to use and deploy to Heroku. I can also help in setting it up.
Sorry, but I'm not going to workaround platform deficiencies by deploying additional apps unless absolutely necessary - this is something what can easily break and we really don't want to maintain additional infrastructure with small manpower we have.
No need for guest account. as we can now add members to slack same as that of how members are added in mailing list.
We can't make archives publicly available but they are only for the users who are members of the channel.
I find this unacceptable for our usage.
Anyway to test the things, I've quickly setup both Slack and Gitter for us:
And at first look Gitter seems way better fit for what we do (keeping away question WHETHER we want to move from IRC to something like this).
-- Michal Čihař | https://cihar.com/ | https://weblate.org/
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