Also, previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9754626
* Free
* Handles thousands of users seamlessly
* Archived via bot same as free Slack
* No noticeable performance hit for high user volumes
* Wide variety of interfaces and integration bots to choose from
* Widely deployed and trusted across tech communities
It's called IRC.
Edit: I can tell more people are encountering challenges using Slack these days. In the past, a suggestion to use IRC would have been downvoted to hell and back!
A lot of people seem hung up on the history, file sharing, or some other feature that Slack has, so I thought I'd take a moment to expand on my ideal setup and how they translate from Slack:
* Long-lived documentation and important team knowledge: Wiki pages (which I prefer even when using Slack and pins or history search are available). Full history of edits is visible and it's easy to access/search.
* Discussions involving a large number of stakeholders: Email. Threads and the async nature of the protocol make it well-suited to discussions when users aren't all online at the same time and the discussion is more thoughtful and isn't moving quickly. Slack threads suck replies aren't very visible and history scrolls quickly in active channels.
* Discussions involving outages, current tasks, and other immediate needs: IRC. It's real time, cross-platform, etc. History can be archived for later searching, but CHAT HISOTRY != DOCUMENTATION. Post-mortems and that sort of thing should end up in a wiki or similar.
* File sharing can be done via some other service with a link pasted into chat. One extra step to paste the link manually isn't a big deal.
* no built-in file uploads
* a bot is required for archiving
* a bot is required for notifications
* no native scrollback/history - IRC bouncers solve this problem, but it's not a plausible solution for most non-techies
* the last two issues also mean that mobile solutions are going to be lacking.
It's possible to have IRC as fully featured as slack, but it does mean either rolling your own solution, or using a lot of other software to accommodate everything and everyone.
* channel services can provide archiving and notifications.
* scrollback can be handled by a bouncer, yes, but it's up to the IT dept to set it up per-user
* there are plenty of usable irc clients for mobile, web, and desktop to satisfy this need.
source: Started using telegram/slack but productivity went down so work launched an internal ircd (inspircd). Internal wiki, git, and sharepoint for documentation/files/code where it belongs. Not the chat client.
- no history while you are not in a channel
- lack of modern features like sending images and lack of good UX
- no mobile notifications
Matrix.org solves these problems very well IMO, but it's adoption is abysmal too.
- Commonly addressed with logging bots and a link to the log in the topic
- Some clients have this: when you drag an image into Glowing Bear (a web frontend for WeeChat that I'm working on), it gets uploaded to imgur and a link to the image is pasted in the channel. It can also display images and videos inline if you wish.
- Easily handled with services like push{over,bullet}
The problem is that these things don't work out of the box and that there's a learning curve. It's just not a very friendly experience for newcomers.
Which leads me to my old-timer question: What's wrong with IRC?
There's a reason why companies like Slack have built billion dollar businesses doing ostensibly the same thing as IRC, and it's because IRC doesn't offer enough value even if it's free.
I like IRC, but newer generations are used to having "full-featured" chats without setup (beauty is in the eye of the beholder).
I also like being able to do some simple markdown in my messages.
Like this guy, I usually don't know at first just what is so unusual about my behavior, and often I never do find out. My favorite game (not yet a decade old) crashes every several minutes for me, playing the way I like. I just save extremely frequently and keep right on playing it.
The moral: Where business is concerned: "Be a smart herder" - don't make any false moves, or adopt odd implementations or uses of key software products (or software controlled products) because the minute your behavior is similar to only 1/1000 users (sometimes 1/100 users), you are using the equivalent of an alpha or beta product, and you should count on getting zero product support. Your complaints will, likely, not even be properly comprehended or will be understood, but labeled "impossible" and abruptly closed (I'm looking at you Open Office.)
We have a core team that's always around, and for that Slack pricing is fine, but we have a significant number of "drive by" users that aren't worth paying $60 per year.
We're generally happy with Slack's features, so which are the similar services that charge something different than per-user?
The "max user size" thing is a bit worrisome, but MMOs have a history of sharding to solve that problem anyway, so hopefully that shouldn't be a problem either. (Players will be able to chat together in a shared Discourse forum, so sharding shouldn't really hurt community-building.)
I wonder if any progress has been made since then to support larger teams, though? It's been quite a while, and Slack's engineering team has been cranking out a lot of great features and improvements lately.
If you're not trying to make money, you still should check the agreements for Slack; this may constitute abuse.
You should also take a look at your architecture, too. You've got a clear message bus where you send things to and receive things from Slack. You may notice that where those messages go matters less to your code than you may think. If you find you can't go with slack, it may not be all that hard to simply set up a web site that plays your text-based game by shimming the message flow in and out, in which case you can do whatever you like, at whatever rate you like. Despite the slick name, you may not need Slack at all. You'd still have the conceit of the chatbot experience, which will definitely appeal to a certain niche, just as MUDs did.
(And that name may be too slick. I don't know how nasty Slack is inclined to be, but directly referencing brand names in your name like that is dangerous from a trademark perspective.)
Also, while I haven't figured out monetization, I don't think there should be any real problems with that either. Other people charge for their slack bots and integrations, so unless they specifically have a problem with a game-style slackbot charging money, there shouldn't be anything preventing me from charging for stuff.
You very well may be right about the name, though. I've just registered "chatandslash.com" as a backup that I can switch to before too much marketing has gone forward, and I've already emailed Slack again to show them what I've come up with and for further confirmation that what I'm up to is fine and dandy before progressing any further.
Oh, and you're totally right about shimming out Slack with my own frontend. It's in the backlog of stuff to do some day potentially, but I think there's a lot to be gained in the meantime by explicitly staying with Slack in the meantime. "An RPG you play in Slack" is a lot more interesting than "An RPG that looks kinda like chat, I guess".
Thanks for the advice!
Worth noting that 1) the author's expectations were wildly unrealistic. 2) Slack has since come out with better tools to manage large teams.
I'm definitely disappointed to hear about this. The pricing model sucks for us as well since it means $60 a head to add someone to the friend group if we wanted to pay for slack. If we could pay a fixed price and get a slightly better message history and more integrations, I'd gladly pay it, but per-head is just ridiculous.
We also use Discord for online gaming since it's easier to invite people outside the group. It's been absolutely fantastic, but we had issues with some people not having access at work.
+ For all kinds of "Work"
+ For teams of all types and sizes
+ Bringing people together to make them productive
Compare that to the messaging for say Hipchat:
+ "Team chat built for business"
+ Enterprise features
+ Loved by your IT team
(Edit - Formatting)
https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/10/19/reactiflux-... (October 2015)
To be fair, Slack never really said it was made to support that many users. Even in my team of less than 20 on the free tier, we hit the 10,000 message limit really quickly. I can't imagine how that must have been with 8 thousand users.
But if Slack were smart about it, they'll realise that there's an opportunity here. They are a very well-funded company and it wouldn't hurt to spend some resources to beef up their current code/infrastructure or to even spin up a separate product that they can profit from.
The biggest takeaway from this should be: if you think you might be pushing a system, you should probably talk to a human first to get confirmation on how it will work for your specific scenario, and not just use their sales page.
Particularly when that tool is so important to your operations.
Two things: a) I wouldn't blink at 10k if my line in the sand was "Unlimited number of people" (would I similarly ask a human if Amharic glyphs are supported if the advertisement suggested "chat in all languages"?) b) It may behoove me to verify claims before jumping in, but it is absolutely 100% the responsibility of the organization to set expectations in line with what it can deliver
False advertising regulations aren't a company destroying "gotcha" like felony theft, they are designed to protect consumers from fraud. Having some technical issue that doesn't impact the vast majority of consumers isn't what it's designed for.
Not students or subscribers. Not "public channel", or "chat room", or some sort of phrase that indicates a large mass of people.
If someone decided to sue them or something, I'd assume they'd have an easy defence saying they clearly meant a team of work colleagues. As many others are saying here, slack simply doesn't seem to be aimed at this use case.
