New experiment with community Slack

[Matt Wynne]

Hello everyone,

At our recent CukenFest conference in London, we tested out a new community chat forum using Slack. It seemed pretty popular, so we've decided to keep the trial going and roll it out a little further.

You can sign up here: https://cucumberbdd-slack-invite.herokuapp.com/

Slack has some advantages and disadvantages which mean I'd expect it to co-exist with this mailing list in the long term. However we do anticipate it having the potential to replace Gitter which has been quite a clunky experience for those of us trying to use it regularly.

Advantages of Slack:

- lots of us already use it for work, so it's convenient for quick discussions especially with or amongst OSS contributors

- nice friendly feel with emojis etc

- decent desktop and mobile app support

- ability to create lots of channels for different purposes

Disadvantages of Slack

- not everyone is allowed to access it from their work desktop browser (though you can probably still use the phone app)

- chat-based conversations only work if you're there at the time. Mailing list will still be better for in-depth discussions

- search within the tool isn't great, and only recent messages are archived

- conversations aren't visible to or indexed by search engines, so effectively invisible to future searches. More like IRC.

I'm keen to hear your feedback, so please head over to the sign-up: https://cucumberbdd-slack-invite.herokuapp.com/ and @mattwynne me once you get in!

cheers,

Matt

CEO, Cucumber Ltd

Author, The Cucumber Book

Lead, Cucumber-Ruby

[Paolo Ambrosio]

On Thu, Jun 29, 2017 at 3:29 PM, Matt Wynne <ma...@cucumber.io> wrote:

Hello everyone,

At our recent CukenFest conference in London, we tested out a new community chat forum using Slack. It seemed pretty popular, so we've decided to keep the trial going and roll it out a little further.

You can sign up here: https://cucumberbdd-slack-invite.herokuapp.com/

Slack has some advantages and disadvantages which mean I'd expect it to co-exist with this mailing list in the long term. However we do anticipate it having the potential to replace Gitter which has been quite a clunky experience for those of us trying to use it regularly.

Very happy to hear that we are not going to have two chat systems :-)

 

Advantages of Slack:

- lots of us already use it for work, so it's convenient for quick discussions especially with or amongst OSS contributors

- nice friendly feel with emojis etc

- decent desktop and mobile app support

- ability to create lots of channels for different purposes

Another massive advantage: threads! Hopefully people will use them because on Gitter it was impossible to follow a conversation.

Disadvantages of Slack

- not everyone is allowed to access it from their work desktop browser (though you can probably still use the phone app)

- chat-based conversations only work if you're there at the time. Mailing list will still be better for in-depth discussions

:+1: (to use the Google Group for in-depth discussions)

 

- search within the tool isn't great, and only recent messages are archived

- conversations aren't visible to or indexed by search engines, so effectively invisible to future searches. More like IRC.

I'm keen to hear your feedback, so please head over to the sign-up: https://cucumberbdd-slack-invite.herokuapp.com/ and @mattwynne me once you get in!

cheers,

Matt

CEO, Cucumber Ltd

Author, The Cucumber Book

Lead, Cucumber-Ruby

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[Stephen Gates]

I help run two communities and have been on a similar journey - email lists, Gitter, Slack. We landed on Discourse https://www.discourse.org

It seems to address the requirements expressed above and is worth a look.

[80Vikram]

+ 1 discourse.org

Appium is using it since last few years and it's more effective than google group.

Regards,
Vikram

[Matt Wynne]

On Wednesday, August 2, 2017 at 10:43:31 AM UTC+1, Stephen Gates wrote:

I help run two communities and have been on a similar journey - email lists, Gitter, Slack. We landed on Discourse  https://www.discourse.org

It seems to address the requirements expressed above and is worth a look.

Thanks for the experience Stephen. I did have a go a setting up discourse and got some of the way, but balked when it came to configuring it - too many options!

Would you be interested in helping set one up for this community?

[Stephen Gates]

Hi Matt,

I'm happy to help you set up a Discourse forum. Be aware Discourse is a paid service https://payments.discourse.org/pricing 

I'm not associated with Discourse apart from using their services. Let me know if you'd like to proceed.

[Matt Wynne]

Thanks for the offer Stephen!

Presumably we could go with https://www.literatecomputing.com/product/discourse-install/ instead of committing to a monthly subscription?

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[Stephen Gates]

Definitely an option. My communities didn't want to self-host but if you have the skills and hardware, it's a cheaper option.

[Matt Wynne]

OK I’ve set it up (hosted, Cucumber Ltd will foot the bill) and sent you and invite Stephen.

I’d like to take a back seat at this point and let volunteers from the community organise testing and, if we like it, migrating across to the new platform.

Please let me know if people need more admin rights or whatever from me.

cheers,
Matt

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