Slack to replace IRC...
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@MrL said in Slack to replace IRC...:
it's "cool and programmers love it".
I did notice that Mattermost is a Gartner "Cool Vendor". I have never used Mattermost so have no opinion on it (nor beef with it) but if how "cool" a vendor is a factor in choosing one then you're definitely
This is basically the article you'd use to win at IT marketing buzzword bingo.
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@Gąska said in Slack to replace IRC...:
@admiral_p said in Slack to replace IRC...:
@MrL yeah but really it's a chat app. Really I don't get it.
And neither do we, professional programmers. The thing is, we've got used to the management making nonsensical decisions, and the saved money won't go to us anyway so we don't bother arguing.
Most of the people I've heard championing it are fellow programmers, not management. As far as I can tell, management brings this particular type of tool because programmers want it.
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In the original article:
“The world is going to continue to use more and more software and we deliberately try to put ourselves in a position where Slack the company gets more valuable as the world uses more software because Slack the product becomes more valuable for our customers as that customer uses more software,” Butterfield said.
Is it me, or does it sound like the output of a Markov-chain based generator?
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@Zerosquare said in Slack to replace IRC...:
does it sound like the output of a Markov-chain based generator?
Sounds like they need to seed it with more marketing nonsense.
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@mikehurley said in Slack to replace IRC...:
@Gąska said in Slack to replace IRC...:
@admiral_p said in Slack to replace IRC...:
@MrL yeah but really it's a chat app. Really I don't get it.
And neither do we, professional programmers. The thing is, we've got used to the management making nonsensical decisions, and the saved money won't go to us anyway so we don't bother arguing.
Most of the people I've heard championing it are fellow programmers, not management. As far as I can tell, management brings this particular type of tool because programmers want it.
I've seen programmers championing Vim, so maybe you have a point...
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@loopback0 There's Ripcord, and it's getting pretty popular, and his support server is right there on the page, and neither Cancel nor his server have ever been banned. So
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@admiral_p existing integrations with other services is handy I guess.
I don't like Slack's client, but I kind of prefer using it over 'just' spinning up a server and 'just' firewalling it and 'just' setting up ZNC and 'just' setting up an SSL cert.
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@mikehurley said in Slack to replace IRC...:
@Gąska said in Slack to replace IRC...:
@admiral_p said in Slack to replace IRC...:
@MrL yeah but really it's a chat app. Really I don't get it.
And neither do we, professional programmers. The thing is, we've got used to the management making nonsensical decisions, and the saved money won't go to us anyway so we don't bother arguing.
Most of the people I've heard championing it are fellow programmers, not management. As far as I can tell, management brings this particular type of tool because programmers want it.
Same mechanism that makes programmers advocate writing new projects in 'this new cool tech everyone is talking about': marketing. IT is ruled by emotions just as any other field. Advertising and marketing techniques are what makes technologies and tools succeed, not merit.
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@MrL I'm not saying Slack is The Best. I'm saying it's Better Than IRC.
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@pie_flavor said in Slack to replace IRC...:
@loopback0 There's Ripcord, and it's getting pretty popular, and his support server is right there on the page, and neither Cancel nor his server have ever been banned. So
It's still against Discord's terms, whether they've done anything about it or not.
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@Gąska said in Slack to replace IRC...:
@mikehurley said in Slack to replace IRC...:
@Gąska said in Slack to replace IRC...:
@admiral_p said in Slack to replace IRC...:
@MrL yeah but really it's a chat app. Really I don't get it.
And neither do we, professional programmers. The thing is, we've got used to the management making nonsensical decisions, and the saved money won't go to us anyway so we don't bother arguing.
Most of the people I've heard championing it are fellow programmers, not management. As far as I can tell, management brings this particular type of tool because programmers want it.
I've seen programmers championing Vim, so maybe you have a point...
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@loopback0 neato. But only the development of Ripcord violates the ToS, not the usage.
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@pie_flavor said in Slack to replace IRC...:
But only the development of Ripcord violates the ToS
Are you bound by it if you didn't read it?
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@pie_flavor said in Slack to replace IRC...:
But only the development of Ripcord violates the ToS, not the usage.
Use of the API for custom clients is against their terms.
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@loopback0 Yep! And it's literally a "if you didn't read it" scenario, because there's two separate ToSes and the one for the API explicitly said you agree to it by reading the developer docs, not by using the service.
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@hungrier said in Slack to replace IRC...:
@pie_flavor said in Slack to replace IRC...:
If IRC is so great, what's the official client?
Why does it need an official client? On Windows the usual recommendation has been mIRC for 20+ years, but it's an open protocol so there are other clients available.
Ha, I still use mIRC for IRC.
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@pie_flavor I can totally see you being this clever in court.
: "Like a milking stool, my case rests on 3 legs."
: "Impressive! Guilty."
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@topspin actually, it might just work. If the agreement you make in order to use service (which is a different agreement from the one to access docs) doesn't contain a clause prohibiting 3rd party clients, then you can use 3rd party clients just fine. You're not bound by agreements you don't accept.
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@Gąska said in Slack to replace IRC...:
You're not bound by agreements you don't accept.
Something something reading it wharrgarbl.
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@pie_flavor the difference from that other topic is, here you don't use any service that you haven't been explicitly allowed to.
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@PJH Wow, their net profit margin grew from -32.5% to -28.9% in the last year. At that rate, they'll break even in
less than 9about 10 (I misread the graph; the trend line crosses between the labels between 8 and 9, but it crosses the axis about 10) years. I'm sure investors will love their IPO.
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@pie_flavor said in Slack to replace IRC...:
Slack does indeed Just Work
At least on Earth-73.
(I've never used Slack, so I don't know whether it works on our planet, too.)
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@topspin said in Slack to replace IRC...:
They need to put less drugs in their marketing department's water.
But then how would they persuade anyone to
sell their souls to Satanwork in marketing?
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@pie_flavor said in Slack to replace IRC...:
Yep! And it's literally a "if you didn't read it" scenario, because there's two separate ToSes and the one for the API explicitly said you agree to it by reading the developer docs, not by using the service.
The Discord ToS has a "we can terminate your access for any reason at any time" clause, so they can get you with either ToS whether it specifically mentions 3rd parties or not.
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@HardwareGeek said in Slack to replace IRC...:
(I've never used Slack, so I don't know whether it works on our planet, too.)
It does. All in all, Slack is a very solid piece of software.
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While I'm sitting here, still not having a single bit of idea how Slack is able to be in any way relevant, in a world where Discord exists, which is basically "Slack, but actually good and useful".
EDIT: ...probably except because of some ToS crap that I just learned about few comments above.
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@Gąska said in Slack to replace IRC...:
@HardwareGeek said in Slack to replace IRC...:
(I've never used Slack, so I don't know whether it works on our planet, too.)
It does. All in all, Slack is a very solid piece of software.
'Solid' as in 'it takes a solid amount of resources to run this'?
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@loopback0 said in Slack to replace IRC...:
It'd cost the company I work for $350k per month if we just included the full-time employees and excluded all outsourced people or contractors.
We'd be looking at close to $10M/year at that rate, and can't move anyway as we deal with quite a lot of data that we absolutely have to keep completely under our control by law. We use Slack a fair bit at work, but the best parts of it are that we can bridge it to IRC and XMPP and we maintain our own logs (on our own XMPP server).
Indeed, there's nothing that Slack offers that's truly more special than an XMPP system could do. They have a fancy client, but not $10M/year worth of fancy.
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@pie_flavor said in Slack to replace IRC...:
I'm not saying Slack is The Best. I'm saying it's Better Than IRC.
That's like saying you run faster than a quadriplegic man in a coma.
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@dkf Yes. When the quadriplegic man in a coma is the current world record holder.
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@Gąska said in Slack to replace IRC...:
@mikehurley said in Slack to replace IRC...:
@Gąska said in Slack to replace IRC...:
@admiral_p said in Slack to replace IRC...:
@MrL yeah but really it's a chat app. Really I don't get it.
And neither do we, professional programmers. The thing is, we've got used to the management making nonsensical decisions, and the saved money won't go to us anyway so we don't bother arguing.
Most of the people I've heard championing it are fellow programmers, not management. As far as I can tell, management brings this particular type of tool because programmers want it.
I've seen programmers championing Vim, so maybe you have a point...
The difference with vim is it'll probably be part of every linux distro forever. You're actually learning something useful. Slack will probably die off in a few years to be replaced with something shinier.
I liked skype. Didn't eat my computer's resources and it was easy to hide chats I was done with so they weren't clogging up my screen. Rich text is a novelty but realistically all you need is bold, italics and an emoji set. Basically I want us all to move the WhatsApp desktop.
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@DogsB said in Slack to replace IRC...:
Basically I want us all to move the WhatsApp desktop.
The app that requires every user to have another device before it functions?
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@loopback0 said in Slack to replace IRC...:
@DogsB said in Slack to replace IRC...:
Basically I want us all to move the WhatsApp desktop.
The app that requires every user to have another device before it functions?
I want my organisation to suffer.
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@dkf This is also way too expensive for my school - it'd probably gobble up about half our total budget for IT.
Also looked into Mattermost (self hosting, yay!) - while their free tier works fine for the most part, unhappily some rather nice-to-have features (LDAP authentication and more detailed user roles) are located in their Enterprise edition. Which again comes down to $39/year/user which at 1700 pupils and 120 teacher would once again be way of too expensive for us.
But I really do like that they allow you to take the source code for their mobile apps and customize those to your orgnaization's requirements.
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@Rhywden said in Slack to replace IRC...:
@dkf This is also way too expensive for my school - it'd probably gobble up about half our total budget for IT.
Also looked into Mattermost (self hosting, yay!) - while their free tier works fine for the most part, unhappily some rather nice-to-have features (LDAP authentication and more detailed user roles) are located in their Enterprise edition. Which again comes down to $39/year/user which at 1700 pupils and 120 teacher would once again be way of too expensive for us.
But I really do like that they allow you to take the source code for their mobile apps and customize those to your orgnaization's requirements.
Did you look into school discounts? Don't most places cut schools a deal on licenses?
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@PJH said in Slack to replace IRC...:
LOL - just kidding - they're going to replace email. Really!:
Meh, I've had customers replace skype, sharepoint and Mail with Microsoft Teams (just like slack, but with all the Microsoft bells and whistles and speed) .
But of course, E-Mail and sharepoint and the old shared drives stay, so now if you ever need to find something ...I'm sure this is just a clever ploy from MS to pitch a new enterprise-Bing search product.
edited to add: oh I almost forgot. Drag & drop is limited to 10 files. 10 FILES. not 10 GB. One wonders how they re-implemented the file upload in such a broken way.
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@Zerosquare said in Slack to replace IRC...:
In the original article:
“The world is going to continue to use more and more software and we deliberately try to put ourselves in a position where Slack the company gets more valuable as the world uses more software because Slack the product becomes more valuable for our customers as that customer uses more software,” Butterfield said.
Is it me, or does it sound like the output of a Markov-chain based generator?
not enough quack.
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@mikehurley said in Slack to replace IRC...:
@Rhywden said in Slack to replace IRC...:
@dkf This is also way too expensive for my school - it'd probably gobble up about half our total budget for IT.
Also looked into Mattermost (self hosting, yay!) - while their free tier works fine for the most part, unhappily some rather nice-to-have features (LDAP authentication and more detailed user roles) are located in their Enterprise edition. Which again comes down to $39/year/user which at 1700 pupils and 120 teacher would once again be way of too expensive for us.
But I really do like that they allow you to take the source code for their mobile apps and customize those to your orgnaization's requirements.
Did you look into school discounts? Don't most places cut schools a deal on licenses?
They don't mention those on their page but I sent their sales team an email to inquire about something along those lines, yes.
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@Kurt-C-Pause said in Slack to replace IRC...:
Drag & drop is limited to 10 files. 10 FILES. not 10 GB. One wonders how they re-implemented the file upload in such a broken way.
Reminds me of an old version of Confluence, which had those sorts of limitations (because of shitty javascript, of course).
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@Rhywden said in Slack to replace IRC...:
They don't mention those on their page but I sent their sales team an email to inquire about something along those lines, yes.
Perhaps you should have sent them a slack instead?
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It reminds me of my favorite antipattern: when the only way to get support for the product is thru the product itself. Some people seem to never have heard of the chicken-and-egg problem.
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@boomzilla Right next to being hit in the sanity lessons?
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@mikehurley said in Slack to replace IRC...:
@Rhywden said in Slack to replace IRC...:
@dkf This is also way too expensive for my school - it'd probably gobble up about half our total budget for IT.
Also looked into Mattermost (self hosting, yay!) - while their free tier works fine for the most part, unhappily some rather nice-to-have features (LDAP authentication and more detailed user roles) are located in their Enterprise edition. Which again comes down to $39/year/user which at 1700 pupils and 120 teacher would once again be way of too expensive for us.
But I really do like that they allow you to take the source code for their mobile apps and customize those to your orgnaization's requirements.
Did you look into school discounts? Don't most places cut schools a deal on licenses?
So, got a reply where they said that they do have a deal for educational institutions where they only charge for the number of staff but not for pupils/students. Considering that we have 120 staff but 1700 students, that drops the fee by quite a bit.
It's also a bit moot for the forseeable future as I've learned that we're locked into a contract with our current provider for another 18 months.
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@Rhywden said in Slack to replace IRC...:
It's also a bit moot for the forseeable future as I've learned that we're locked into a contract with our current provider for another 18 months.
Considering how quick some places move, that means you need to start the paperwork now, right?
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@dcon said in Slack to replace IRC...:
@Rhywden said in Slack to replace IRC...:
It's also a bit moot for the forseeable future as I've learned that we're locked into a contract with our current provider for another 18 months.
Considering how quick some places move, that means you need to start the paperwork now, right?
Thankfully, that's something we have complete autonomy over. Especially as we're self-hosting.
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Hey, it worked, I had forgotten about this and now I am reminded.
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@mikehurley Sadly most of the protocols Trillian supports have been shut down, so now you get Astra, XMPP (and derivatives, Facebook and pre-Hangouts Google Talk), IRC, and "Olark" (whatever that is). Doubly sadly, the plugin documentation froze at version 3; we're now on version 6, several key structures have undocumented changes, and there is no UI for managing plugins (or skins) anymore, so the major reason to use Trillian (and why I bought an eternal Pro license) has pretty much ceased to exist.
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Looks like Microsoft is looking to replace Slack.