Ask HN: Have you tried using forum software in place of Slack at work?

[dmarlow]

The recent submission on Slack (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34540085) got me thinking about how using something like Discourse would look like. Having something like ChatGPT summarizing things as you go would also be useful. If you've done it, how did it go? Any interesting lessons learned?

[tra3]

Yeah, we use a (virtual?) private instance of stack overflow. Now I just have another "inbox" to check.

In the comments to the post you linked, someone mentioned funnelling their slack's @here or @username messages to their email inbox and processing them in arrival order. This made me realize what bothers me about me about slack the most -- it's the lack of customizability.

The only experience with slack you can have is what slack deems appropriate. Contrast that with email filtering. Even IRC with all it's quirks was infinitely more flexible.

Ultimately trying to keep up with everything that's being discussed on slack is impossible, but I sorely miss a workflow that allows me to specify what should be bubbled up..

[dieselgate]

A tough part about slack is messages deletion after whatever time frame. Not sure what the pricing policies are but even the enterprise account I use for work deletes (private maybe?) messages, and separately the free tier do as well. (maybe the company is just cheap)

I'd personally not care too much if it's slack/forum like platform but my biggest request/need is message persistence - especially for professional/enterprise use

Edit: it's interesting to think about a private Overflow instance being used for work comms. - can't even really visualize how that'd work because i always navigate to stack overflow topics via search engine

[akerl_]

Pretty sure this is a company setting. The basic paid plan has unlimited message retention.

But most companies don’t want unlimited retention because it’s a massive business risk, so they pick a time horizon and set it globally.

[mattbrewsbytes]

I've explored the idea of SO for work but I think you've hit the problem with Slack + any other discussion tool: its another inbox to check and that is a mental hurdle for a lot of people. Its not mentally taxing to check someplace else it will just get forgotten if the main mode of communication is instantly sending slack messages.

What might be handy is a bot to take a slack thread and dump it to a wiki page for things you want to live on beyond the organizations slack retention period.

[robertlagrant]

> its another inbox to check

Them having a slick way to process emails as well as chat in the same client would be pretty useful. Even though, I know, it disregards an ancient warning [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski's_Law

[walterbell]

IRCcloud ($50/year) and Matrix/Element (free) provide unified clients for Slack and IRC.

[inactiveseller]

I create this account to answer. Yes. In 2010 Aprox i was at charge of a team of four junior programmers and a female documentator. The business was related to Mexican IRS things, mangaing sensitive information. I create am open forum MYBB for all of them and a CATEGORY with my team name, and a forum for each one. Example : Junior 1 forum, he can see and create, but not edit passing x time. He cant see the junior 2,3 or 4 forum. For me and upper management was transparent. I can see the individual forums and general, and documentation was in another subforum.

I ask all the people to say daily what they do (general manner), biggest problem, and biggest acheivement. If they had problem with sales asking suare circles, they put as a problem, if they have problem with internet put there, if they need ask for a schedule change to go to baby, bank , Mexican IRS or similar they do there.

Other forums in the category include tips, code, snippets, rules, etc. Was a complet success. We got a surprise inspection from partners and customers and pass all the security , traceability, scrum and agiles controls. This last aprox two whole years.

Two months later i was demoted/changed to other area of API and special projects because i refuse to obbey against the law / Mexican IRS orders, and internal desorganization. They do the order to not use more, but not erase. Aprox six months later, planning my exit of the business, i ask public in mails permissions to erase all the repositories / forums / database of that era, because have sensible information, that was true. i get authorization and erase all.

The better part was two weeks later we receive a surprise inspection and get 0/10, yes, zero. The people in my old position was a friend of a founder and use the time playing electric guitar in the office. I leave when they ask me to fix all the mess of three years, without power, all responsability, for the same money, but too they ask me for erase all the referential integrity. I quit because in an IRS related business, was suicidal.

But yes, the forum appl yvery well but need take time to proper put levels of visbility and edition.

[fragmede]

Thank you so much for sharing your story! I'm sorry it ended so poorly. Hopefully you are doing better these days. Would you mind sharing more about how the forum was successful?

[inactiveseller]

Yep, i am a 51 year old contractor, begin programming in 1991. Currently in a gig uin the second biggest public university doing some things in an isolated computer (airgapped, monolith, need be done without frameworks because special conditions of the codebases etc... are two laravel-esque 5.6 php codebase of 2017 and a more decente 7.6 php in special servers)

The forum was a success for many reasons but need put the background first and a story itself. The reason why i know how use forums is relevant. Programmer as i said, in 2005 i begin to be stalked by a prehispanic beleiver drug addict who fund a cult.

Sound crazy but They are convinced that I was possessed by an alien, from an invasion led two million years ago by the god Tezcatlipoca. These insane guys somehow got hold of my heritage and tried to impersonate me, and put their newcomers on trial to try to kill me. At the same time I was the moderator of a forum with more than 165,000 messages in egroups. Because of the stalking/harassment I went to invision, and later for prices and technical reasons to mybb (those forums in the end I migrated to wordpress).

As a result of these people's attacks, the forums were much better due to issues of apache logs, IP addresses in each post, granular access levels and I could detect without problems when they tried to enter but due to the level of trust or areas of interest, I ended up creating different groups of access levels in those forums, which made it clear to me that they were useful in my work. Now I explain why.

The main advantage is that we didn't have to install anything. So we could use it anywhere, being a client's site, cybercafe, on vacation, etc. There was no excuse not to use it. I told the people on the team that it allowed me to show their progress and what they needed. If the results came back, they would get a new chair, or a new printer, etc.

As far as I remember, users could only register through the administrator (me), so there was no spam. I gave it as long as HR confirmed that certain things had been verified. The access levels were Not logged in, that is, an visitor, who could be a client, could see FAQ, manuals, pdf for download... or common problems (by the way, our usernames were the initials of our names). Second, users who logged in could see something. Accounting used to ask us for things or sales, so in another subforum, for logged in users, I put the date of requirements in a different category and they had to give the go-ahead right there. The programmers could see the themes, and the management too. They received a response by email, due to the configuration, and the thread functioned as a ticket number. The programmers, in their own category, only saw their own forum or cabinet, as I called it, and a few common ones. If I had to give access to sensitive material that we couldn't send by email, in another forum I would give and remove permissions for the person to download it to their PC. No USB devices or paper in or out of the facilities were allowed. Lastly, my own tech notes, reminders, or whatever were in a category called Admin Only.

From the human point of view the main advantages were centralization, everything was in one place. From the point of view of operational security, everything was governed by access levels, which could be backed up in a single step (I was in a vps cpanel at knownhost), in a secure installation and was also outside the offices, without depending on of access for continuity of operations or the installation of software. From the point of view of scrum Agile it was excellent because you could see what had been done in sprints, in another forum called sprints, and feedback from customers is the basis of AGILE. So in the three main clients there were two forums that ONLY THAT client saw, the programmers and me. One was company X requirements, and the other was company X signed documents. On the outside it was an innocent question-answer site for our forum, but all the control of the operation could be done from there.

When they transferred me to the special operations area, the guy with the electric guitar left early on Fridays to see his children and returned Monday at around two in the afternoon. (divorced engineer, linux user who did nothing on the list of 10 mid-term requirements on the day I was reassigned). They did what they called scrum and agile sessions, but they were anything but that, and they stopped keeping track of what everyone did on a daily basis, and since they didn't solve anyone's problems, everything was going to explode. My main problem when I thought about leaving that place, was that a forum that was not updated could be hacked, so if I left I couldn't leave that sensitive information there. So my email was basically something like "Good afternoon, since Alex has already implemented a new way of working, I think it is neither necessary nor prudent to keep the content of the QA repository any longer, with all its cabinets. I say this because I have not seen that software updates have been run, so I think that since we keep sensitive information and it is no longer being used, it is best to delete that information and its backups, since with Alex's workflow it is not needed. I would appreciate it if you would confirm if I can delete that information, and on the night of the 31st I will remove it from the monthly backups." The next thing is to go to the director, accountant, sales staff and have them sign my email (by protocol we did that sometimes). Alex answered for me delete it, and the rest is history.

[fragmede]

Wow! Thank you for sharing!

[cr3ative]

Slack and A Forum are not comparable. Slack is largely for real-time communication which is rarely referenced historically, a forum is more of a knowledge store.

[fragmede]

Everything is comparable! Some comparisons don't make sense because of how different they are, but Slack vs eg Discourse (not Discord) are in a similar enough realm of human interaction that it's worth taking the time to make the comparison. Especially because Slack is seen as the be-all end-all of where things live these days.

[ComputerGuru]

There are forums with real time components to them (live updating, online indicators, etc). That just makes slack a worse forum.

[mjrbrennan]

Disclaimer: I work at Discourse. We discuss all our work on an internal Discourse forum, it makes everything much easier to track and long form slow lane discussion is encouraged and baked into Discourse.

We also have chat built in now, with a strong emphasis on interoperability between chat channels and topics so discussions can be easily moved between the fast and slow lane. I love the way we work and I always feel like communicating with the rest of my colleagues is seamless.

The blog post on our recent 3.0 release goes into this more if you are interested https://blog.discourse.org/2023/01/discourse-3-0-is-here/

[dmarlow]

Thanks for sharing! I had no idea this was possible. I think this makes things much more interesting.

[v3ss0n]

We use Zulip and productivity sky rocketed, it's Cross between forums and chat and we replaced task tracking too.

[gardenhedge]

I would love a proper work forum. Unfortunately, my work place does not have an async culture at all. People would respond to forum posts with phone calls.

[cpach]

Fly does this and it seems to work well for them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30380570

At my workplace we have Slack, but not Discourse. We do have Confluence though, which works quite good for stuff that needs to be referenced in future.

[sethammons]

My experience with Confluence is it only works if you have a link to the document. Search is utterly useless. The only search I've found worse is Google Docs. I can be in a meeting and search direct quotes or titles of documents being shared on screen and they will not come up in gdoc's search; I have to request a link every time. Even for documents I've previously opened.

[fragmede]

At Google there is an internal stack overflow-ish system so that questions have a focal point. You need a modern FAQ system to deduplicate work as much as possible. 30 different people wandering into a slack channel asking the same question is such a waste of everyone's time! Lesson learned is you can't live without it!

I'd recommend also taking a look at Loom. They replace meetings with video recordings so you can avoid meetings, with less overhead, and get more information shared.

[hiidrew]

Quill was like a cross between slack and some forum functions. Never used it at work but did for another project. Sadly was bought and decommissioned by Twitter.

[mozman]

IRC is the best workplace communication tool IMO

[eurticket]

What forum software is still viable?

[tn1]

Things like phpBB, MyBB, or even commercial ones like XenForo are extremely customizable and integrate well with almost any auth system

[readonthegoapp]

Jive Software?

https://www.jivesoftware.com/

Haven't used it lately tho.

I hit the video link on their page and the page just seems to reload. Chrome android mobile.

[ComputerGuru]

Jive is for corporate. Never found moderators or power users that liked it over vB, myBB, XenForo, IPB, etc.

[readonthegoapp]

i assumed OP was looking for corporate, since they want to replace Slack.

[2Gkashmiri]

isnt discourse good enough?

[multjoy]

Compared with phpBB, no. It looks great but is far harder to use.

[1123581321]

Discourse is much easier to use than phpbb.

[paulryanrogers]

Simple Machines

[Waterluvian]

Slack is more like Sametime Connect

[2Gkashmiri]

boo.. that would be so uncool

/s