Show HN: Bot to steer discussions from Slack to Discourse

https://medium.dgraph.io/wisemonk-a-slackbot-to-move-discussions-from-slack-to-discourse-22a53ddce78f#.5zv27u6mt

by mrjn • 10 years ago

106 47 10 years ago

medium.dgraph.io

Illniyar• 10 years ago

Huh, I can only assume slack is going to remove this api very soon after this, nothing makes companies clamp down on openess sooner then syphoning off users.

smaili• 10 years ago

Shouldn't developers have the freedom to create whatever they like with "open" APIs made available?

diyorgasms• 10 years ago

Absolutely they should. But I don't think a rational self-interested company would continue to allow those APIs to be used in order to facilitate a competitor siphoning off users.

overcast• 10 years ago

Open API's are basically, have others keep trying ideas until one sticks, then we'll consume the project and roll it up into our product.

kefka2• 10 years ago

That's fine.

Their potential killing of the APIs won't affect if I use Sikuli to automate it.

Moru• 10 years ago

A letter from a lawyer might though

yoz-y• 10 years ago

I do not think that this particular extension will have enough impact on Slack for them to feel threatened.

tlrobinson• 10 years ago

I was going to say that's unlikely since the API is part of what makes Slack Slack, but I would have said the same thing about Twitter 6 years ago...

That said, Twitter and Slack are very different beasts. There is not nearly the same network effect to keep teams from switching to a competitor... except to the extent that 3rd party products integrate with Slack's API...

bhaak3• 10 years ago

Discourse has become such an integral part of our company that we abandoned making decisions in meetings entirely.

That's really impressive and cool.

Being an old Usenet fart, I have some problems with Discoure's linear discussion threads (I don't have that problem with twitter's similar structure though).

But I guess if you can keep people on topic and open up new threads for discussions that get side-tracked, it can be a really cool tool.

schoen• 10 years ago

Have the Discourse developers ever commented on whether they deliberately didn't support visualization of the thread structure? The software appears to know the thread structure (because there's a specific UI to reply to, and quote, a particular message), but it doesn't do much to show it to a reader -- or provide other thread features that you might find in a news reader, like marking a subthread as read or hiding it.

Do we know if this is something Discourse might support in a future version?

alexhutcheson• 10 years ago

https://blog.codinghorror.com/web-discussions-flat-by-design...

danneu2• 10 years ago

The tree structure is pretty useless and incomplete on a traditional forum. The only information you have is when the user explicitly opts in to a quote-reply.

Most replies are written in the quick-reply box (no parent) because they are responding to what is being said in the last X posts. Assuming orphan posts are top-level replies to the topic is nonsensical, and you can verify this by toggling on threaded-view on forums that support it.

The next best thing is to just link the upstream post from a post that quoted/replied to another, which is what Discourse and traditional forums already do.

kodablah• 10 years ago

Of all sites, I have found all the disparate sbnation sites to have the best live, threaded discussion model. They do it threaded like reddit or HN, but new updates show live and unread and there are various shortcuts to jump to next unread, mark all as read, etc. The key to live, threaded discussion is unread message support.

bhaak3• 10 years ago

The key to live, threaded discussion is unread message support.

Exactly. The issue that many discussions on Reddit turn into one-on-one discussion is because of this. You can easily see new replies to your comments but not for other new comments.

The HN has the same issue but it doesn't seem to be so extreme. Maybe many people have site enhancements scripts installed? There are various browser addons for Reddit that highlight new comments since the last visit but it would of course be much better, if this were a standard feature.

tokenizerrr2• 10 years ago

I recently had to deal with some Discourse users trying to hijack my community's discussions to a Discourse chatroom. Absolutely awful experience and terrible client support.

jSully24• 10 years ago

Could you provide more details on what happened? It sounds like you have a mix of human issues, "users thing to hijack" and something with the product "terrible client support".

I'd be interested to understand what you ran into in more detail.

JeremyBanks• 10 years ago

Are you talking about Discord?

tokenizerrr2• 10 years ago

It seems that I am. I even read the blog post thinking it was about Discord. Apologies.

codinghorror2• 10 years ago

Almost certainly referring to Discord, as Discourse doesn't have chat. Not that people haven't asked us to build it, but I think a good Slack integration is a far better choice, plus Slack is free (in terms of hosting costs, and ease of starting with just 2 or 3 people) in a way that is highly complimentary to what Discourse does.

I like to think of Discourse as the "long term memories" in Pixar's Inside Out. You ship stuff there as you need to. A mixture of mostly short term and sometimes long term memories is a sane and manageable arrangement for most humans.

robbfitzsimmons• 10 years ago

Instead of going through contortions trying to break bad Slack habits and worrying about the API getting shut off, maybe it's worth checking out something made for the purpose.

In the original post from the AgileBits team quoted at the top, that team tried Basecamp, which to me seems to do a good job of separating thoughtful/long-form discussion from chat, along with the weekend-pause feature.

Kratisto• 10 years ago

Wow until about half way through the article I read Discourse as Discord, and it didn't make any sense to me. Now that I understand, this seems like a pretty cool solution. I have been really loving both slack and discord for personal use. Unfortunately, my work use Skype for business. I have been pushing for a switch to slack.

seangrogg• 10 years ago

I read exactly the same thing - I was wondering if he was going to start touting how amazing it is to be able to just start talking with people in "Engineering Rooms" or something.

codinghorror2• 10 years ago

The naming similarity is unfortunate, but they are both great English words that more or less accurately describe the respective products...

johanneskanybal• 10 years ago

Sounds like it's working for you. Why people don't turn notifications off is beyond me though. Still, curating/making asynchronous is the biggest issue with slack so thumbs up.

mrjn6• 10 years ago

The main reason for not turning off notifications is the fear of missing out, decisions being made without you. And it's a very valid fear.

enraged_camel2• 10 years ago

You seem to have posted this in multiple places. I don't think it's a valid fear at all. If people are constantly monitoring Slack for fear of missing out on decisions, then don't make decisions over Slack. It's really as simple as that.

We have policies that dictate what types of conversations belong in Slack and what types of conversations don't. If something requires a person's input, they are summoned to Slack via a mention. Otherwise, it's widely understood and accepted that Slack is primarily for Q&A, collaboration, sharing of cool finds, and what we classify as "general chat."

Other than that, we also have meetings (both in person and via remote session/conference) for more important topics and decisions. The results of those meetings are communicated to the team via email (which everyone is expected to check twice per day).

If you try to use Slack for everything, it will fail for you. That holds true for any tool.

indspenceable• 10 years ago

Or just turn off notifications on every message? I only get notified on @mentions and I don't feel like I'm oncall.

pavel_lishin• 10 years ago

I agree, this seems very much like a culture problem that wants a culture fix, not a technical one.

mrjn6• 10 years ago

The main reason for not turning off notifications is the fear of missing out, decisions being made without you. And it's a very valid fear.

One team member going away from Slack is bad for the member and for the team. If everyone else participates and you're on the sideline, then you're an oddball and not a team player.

For it to be effective, the whole team has to willingly move away from it.

jrockway• 10 years ago

Do you all work at companies that don't do design reviews and code reviews? Those seem like good ways to keep people in the loop and get feedback on idea/code. Code reviews should be interrupts, but nothing else should be.

I find the amount of work one can practically achieve in a day to be a good limiter of how much people will be kept out of the loop if they are not actively engaging in their email (or whatever system people use). The reality is, no matter how fast you think you're moving, it's not that fast.

mrmondo• 10 years ago

Right on, I approve of this. I wish people would give up on slack already - it's a proprietary hype machine that's made it's way to the core of too many complex systems.

Kiro• 10 years ago

So, do you have any real criticism or do you just hate proprietary software and hyped things?

moron4hire2• 10 years ago

For FOSS advocates, the proprietary nature is the criticism, as proprietary software has been shown time and time again to be harmful to users.

gingerlime• 10 years ago

Not too familiar with Discourse, and I'm curious about the difference to trello comments on a card (in this context of taking discussions offline from slack.)

Could anyone who uses both trello and discourse care to comment about the difference in experience?

mrjn6• 10 years ago

We at Dgraph use Trello as well. TBH, the commenting on Trello is primitive compared to Discourse. We still comment on Trello when we're talking about specific cards -- but if it needs thorough discussion, we always go to Discourse.

In fact, it's pretty common for us to create Trello cards out of discussion at discuss.dgraph.io.

Also note that we keep our Slack only for general chit chat. As soon as something becomes more "structured", we switch it to Discourse. We also actively encourage people to just create topics there instead of bringing it on Slack in the first place.

davidbanham• 10 years ago

Very excited about this! We're on the same path of Slack+ Discourse. We tried switching chat to other tools that would be more fit for purpose but just couldn't drive engagement. Slack is too sticky.

I'm planning to take this bot for a spin today. Aside from that, it's just great to hear there are other companies feeling the same pains as we are.

mrjn6• 10 years ago

Awesome! We took that detour as well, tried a bunch of other chat apps, but in the end, Slack won out. It's the most mature chat system out there.

With Wisemonk keeping us accountable, we're now able to tackle the negatives of Slack; so eager to learn your experiences.

Show HN: Bot to steer discussions from Slack to Discourse

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