Calling Slack an IRC replacement is to pretend IRC is far more primitive than it was even twenty years ago. Slack is horrid at even moderate volume conversations.
I’m an active IRC user. I’ve been asked to use Slack for three different teams. I gave up because it was just so badly designed. As volume increases on Slack, the issues become more apparent. The volume that I often see on #lopsa or similar moderate activity IRC channels was much more difficult to consume on Slack. High volume channels were nearly impossible. 1. The lack of configuration for every single Slack client is an acknowledged by the developers problem that they have no intention of fixing. They want to impose their design and force everyone to waste huge volumes of space on design concepts that were abandoned years ago by other IM tools. (Try hiding the list of members and only display the chat window. You can’t. Try using a dark background with light text, you can’t unless you use only the web page and a stylesheet override) 2. There is no concept of "Don’t bother me anymore, but let me still join this discussion when I so choose, stop telling me there are unread messages in that channel, but do tell me for other channels. It’s just a single "there are unread messages somewhere in some channel in some team." 3. Very hard to customize Slack’s interface to something less obtrusive. The notion of a text based interface is anathema. 4. Slack is very poorly built for multi-channel membership, multi-team membership. Hard to see which channel/team has unread messages. 5. The XMPP gateway isn’t *quite* done correctly for group chat. Several clients don’t work with it. 6. The IRC gateway is much worse. The IRC channel mirroring is very clumsy. No way to say "That person on that IRC channel is the person of the same nick on the Slack web forum." Everything is from the gateway bot. 7. There are many people for whom Slack is prohibited, period, but IRC is acceptable. As a security geek, I find the Slack trend … troublesome. Slack is just the new hotness with no real value add. There are GUI based IRC clients if you want a GUI interface. I’ve used several over the years. To reiterate Cat from elsewhere in this thread, you have a solution in search of a problem. > On 2015-07-12, at 07:05 , Carolyn Rowland <[email protected]> wrote: > > I second slack as an irc replacement. You can link slack to irc so you don't > have to deal with yet another interface. > > I don't see it as a replacement for email though. > > Carolyn > > Sent using a mouse-sized keyboard with feigned autocorrect intelligence. > > On Jul 12, 2015, at 9:53 AM, Matt Simmons <[email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > >> For what it's worth, I agree with Adam regarding email, but slack is a >> pretty clear replacement for IRC in a lot of companies and even sysadmin >> groups that I'm in. >> >> Matt >> >> On Jul 12, 2015 9:06 AM, "Adam Moskowitz" <[email protected] >> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: >> Allan Irving wrote: >> > How do we feel about trailing Slack instead of discussion lists? >> >> While email may not be perfect, and it doesn't offer many of the >> features found in tools such as Slack or Google Plus or Twitter, it has >> two big advantages: First, everyone uses email, so no matter how many >> forums you participate in, messages appear right there in a tool you >> already go to multiple times per day. The alternative is to learn a half >> dozen different interfaces, with what seems like a new one every year. >> Second, email is pretty much the only not-real-time communication >> mechanism that lets each user pick his or her own interface. I like >> mutt, he likes Google Mail, she likes the Apple Mac mail client, some >> other guy likes Thunderbird, and one person I know still uses a weird >> emacs mail client -- but it's all the same messages. Sure, sites like >> Twitter publish their APIs, but there are still many more email clients >> than there are clients for any particular forum tool. >> >> So thanks, but I'm sticking to email. >> >> Adam >> _______________________________________________ >> Discuss mailing list >> [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> >> https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss >> <https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss> >> This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators >> http://lopsa.org/ <http://lopsa.org/> >> _______________________________________________ >> Discuss mailing list >> [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> >> https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss >> <https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss> >> This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators >> http://lopsa.org/ <http://lopsa.org/> > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss > This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators > http://lopsa.org/ ---- "The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue." Edward R Murrow (1964) Mark McCullough [email protected]
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