Let's not lose our corporate memory!

[trent the thief]

Hi All,

Sure, we look at Slack 99% of the time. But when message drop off after 90 days, it's like ghosts said it because there's no record and we can't recall all the details.

If you find a cool workaround and a way to accomplish some crazy task that has everyone scratching their heads, please share it here. Your future head-scratching self and everyone else will thank you.

Thanks!

[Feebeegeebee]

Hi,
I don't use the Flare Slack channels, as I always refer to this forum.
However, if Slack messages are dropping off after 90 days, it's because the Workspace owner or Organisation owner has specified that in the settings. By default, they're retained for the lifetime of the workspace.
So contact the Slack admin to change the retention policy.

See here for more info:
https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/help/artic ... versations

Regards,
Feebeegeebee

[NorthEast]

They're hidden after 90 days because it's not a paid subscription

It says $7.25 per person per month - and there's 2000 members!

But yeah, the lack of any history on Slack is massively irritating. It's got a pretty interface, but is a step backwards as you can't build a body of knowledge that people can refer to.

[trent the thief]

Yep, I am in complete agreement. I think the price is a bit much. If I had to pay for my own, I might go $50 a year.

So just the same way we can become a company's corporate memory, we can do that for ourselves, too.

I'm looking to put a scraping bot to work. I have a couple leads for a script from other sites.

[Nita Beck]

When we had access to our entire history when Slack dangled a trial of a paid plan early in 2023, a few volunteers (particulary Mattias Sanders) exported our entire history at the time and started to turn it into a Flare project. MadCap also set us up with a complimentary Central subscription so that we could publish our Slack archive as an HTML5 site. I have periodically checked in with the volunteers to see how the project is going, but it hasn't gotten a lot of attention in recent months. I can ping the volunteers again to see if we can get the site launched soon. That said, we've probably lost a couple of months of history of this past spring. My hope is that the volunteers can export on a monthly basis so that we keep the archive up to date.

[Nita Beck]

Regarding the Slack pricing plan, yes, it's a per-user plan, although I'm pretty sure it's a per *active* user plan. I'm not sure how many active users there are, but we'd be talking about thousands of dollars per month in any case. And as one of the founders of the Slack community, there is no freaking way that I would volunteer to collect "dues" from members to defray the costs.

Yes, Slack has its drawbacks, as do the forums. (I'm really bothered that I cannot edit one of my own posts anymore!) I can speak only for myself in saying that I have much preferred the immediacy of the Slack community over the forums. As a work-from-homer for going on 30 years, Slack has given me (or rather gave me, now that I'm retired) the sense of having co-workers, that I could pop into someon'e cubicle or they into mine to ask a question.

But I agree that the Slack paradigm means that our "hive" knowledge is always ephemeral.

[NorthEast]

I think it's a problem that we have two competing Flare communities (which Slack has already won), but neither really ticks all the boxes for what you want in a community self-support site.

I think Slack would have been a great choice, if only you could search and refer to previous answers to questions. But If MadCap aren't going to pay for that, then I'm not sure it's the best choice.

For me, I'd like something that can be a good resource for questions/answers like a Stackoverflow, but has the friendliness of Slack.

[RStreets]

There's not that one perfect platform, is there! Never will be.

I'm afraid that regarding the Slack community FOMO has not (yet) won out over the overload of competing tools I'm already lumbered with (Confluence, JIRA, Teams, various forums...) so I've never asked to join. As a lone author, that accumulation of searchable knowledge here is too useful to abandon.

[Feebeegeebee]

Ah. I hadn't realised the cost of Slack per user. Yikes!
That makes sense.
I refer to this forum, for the same reason as @RStreets - too many other competing tools that already ping, message and email throughout the day.
At least here, you can search back through and pose a question, if you need to.
Feebeegeebee.

[trent the thief]

As Nita mentioned, us Flare users are kinda light on the ground and using Slack provides a sense of community that we probably can't find locally. I know about the physical user groups, but for those one needs even more time than we need to just pop into Slack or to the forum.

And all those others comms channels we have going? Yeah, those are time eaters we can't ignore. But remember, Flare's Slack channel and this forum are the ones that'll save your bacon someday

So let's not forget that we have this wonder resource to store those answers and that many of the first generation of Flare Users are beginning to reach their EOL as active writers and we can't afford to lose that memory.

[trent the thief]

@Nita,

Who is running the Slack to Central effort?

[ChoccieMuffin]

I don't use Slack because my previous employer banned it as a security risk, and I'm not going to go looking at something on my personal account that I have to access from my personal computer rather than my work computer, because I don't turn on my personal computer very often. The forums are my go-to resource, and if everybody's moving over to Slack instead, then I'm just going to have to accept that I'm missing out (and also not giving help).

Do people post the same questions in both places? If so, then I'm DEFINITELY not going to move over to Slack because I just don't have the time to answer things in both places.

I'm also not willing to fork out for membership of Slack, and the fact that things disappear after 3 months makes me think it's not so wonderful - I've searched in these forums and got answers to questions going back several years, so the archive is invaluable.

[trent the thief]

Oh, there's a misunderstanding.

I don't want everyone to abandon the forum. I want people who post cool fixes/hacks on Slack to put them over here, too!

Slack rolls a 90-day message window on our channels because it's a free plan. They only have two accounts: The free plan that we use and what companies pay for at about $7.50 a head. Anything older than 90 days on the free plan is lost. Slack's awesome if the company is willing to foot the bill.

I answer questions where I see them first, just like stack or reddit groups. Cross-posting there confuses things and cheapens search results.

I'd be willing to pay as though joining a website, but it's a moot point. MadCap doesn't want to incur the expense of Slack for support and I don't blame them at all. It's way overpriced. Especially considering that people in collaboration can do almost everything Slack offers using free, online tools.