[morgante]

I understand that you decided to use Slack. Maybe other communities are doing the same thing.

But that does not mean Slack is under any obligation to support your use case, especially when they are pretty clear about what Slack is for.

It's right there on the homepage: "Slack is a platform for team communication."

A course with hundreds of thousands of students is in no way a "team."

[nostrademons]

I might be misreading the post, but my interpretation was that the audience is other large communities, MOOCs, and other loosely affiliated organizations that may want to try Slack, not the Slack team itself. They're providing useful information for the former, particularly if several other organizations have made similar mistakes.

[morgante]

The post certainly seems to attempt to lay blame on Slack. If their goal were just to educate large communities, it would be titled something like "What Slack isn't good for."

[pbreit]

The primary complaint is an unpublished limit that is counter to a main selling point.

[gambiter]

Most 'unlimited' things still have some max. Using a BIGINT for your primary key will get you a max of 18446744073709551615. Should we complain that we can't go higher in any application that uses one of these?

Slack's advertisement for unlimited users was based on their product's design. Their hard limit is perfectly reasonable because the interface wasn't really designed to handle 10k users in the first place.

To complain about this is like buying a sailboat and complaining when you sail it into a hurricane.

[angelbob]

I would complain if it had that limit and was called UNLIMITEDINT, for whatever that's worth.

[gambiter]

You seem to be missing the point. I'm saying there's literally NO application that claims 'unlimited' that doesn't actually have SOME limit. There are always going to be technical limitations. Even if it's unlimited in practice (as in, no customer will ever reach the limit we've set) there is going to be SOME limit.

Marketing materials are designed to show the intended audience how they may use something. Slack was created for use by teams, teams that know each other and that need to collaborate. Within that context, a limit of 10000 users is pretty reasonable because it IS 'unlimited' for their target audience who will never need 10000 accounts.

Again, the sailboat analogy. I was sold on my sailboat being 'seaworthy'. Does that mean it can literally handle anything the sea throws at it? No. It's a label used to show the target audience how they may use it. If I choose to sail into conditions it wasn't designed to handle, it isn't the builder's fault, it's mine.