[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.