Show HN: BetterSlack – A Chrome extension to make Slack better

[fb03]

I have tried slack for some months and found it super laggy, both on the desktop and on android.

Then someone invited me to try Discord for company comms and I said "that's a gaming-oriented app, cmon it won't work well".... my mind was blown by how smooth Discord is.

We are a small shop but since we migrated from Slack to Discord we haven't been focusing much on 'how to communicate' but more on actually just chatting.

I advise everyone that talks about Slack to try Discord as a good alternative, even if your use case is synchronizing a loosely-knit team over the internet.

[brobdingnagians]

Hmm, looks like Discord backend is built on C++/Elixir/Erlang[1], and Slack is built on a scripting language. I think people underestimate the difference in scalability and UX with something like this that handles lots of small packets.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/3q62hw/on_what_...

[kmf]

Discord's role/permission management is incredibly powerful. There's a couple things I'd love to see to make it a bit easier to use (duplicating/copying permissions between roles would be great), but I'm comfortably using it for a public Discord channel with 300+ members and growing[1] and I can actually visualize how to keep the chat functional if the member count grows by 10x.

I strongly recommend Discord over Slack for public chat groups; I'd happily use it over Slack for company chat as well, with the caveat that the integration/app story isn't quite as far along as Slack is.

[1]: https://byteconf.com/discord

[buf]

I run a 3000+ person community on Discord. It's incredibly easy to get a simple access control list going which makes managing this many people a breeze. For public facing roles, users themselves can enter the Discord server and choose their own roles, which makes all my previously manual human tasks automated.

Plus I pay nothing.

[LinuxBender]

I would like to see an on-prem version or appliance for Discord so that I can protect our messages, set global and channel data retention policies.

[g3rv4]

I'd love to give zulip a try

[leppr]

Clicking on a Discord message notification on the mobile app doesn't redirect you to the relevant chat, it just opens Discord at your last location. On the Linux desktop app there used to be many times it would get stuck on the loading spinner. It just feels less polished than Slack.

[graeme]

Interesting. Can you have a company org, channels the way slack does, permissions, dm's etc?

[tmoravec]

Slack is snappy and works well in Firefox :) . With desktop notifications and whatnot.

[oweiler]

Required reading regarding Discord: https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/discord.html

TL;DR

Discord explicitly confirms in its privacy policy[1] that it collects the following information:

IP AddressDevice UUIDUser's e-mail addressAll text messagesAll imagesAll VOIP data (voice chat)Open rates for e-mail sent by Discord

[danShumway]

> If you write [here's a link](https://gmc.uy), it shows it as a link :)

> The nice part? it shows it as a link for everybody, not only those who have the extension installed.

Wait, wat? I'm looking at the code[0], and this is the most surprising part of this entire project to me. Slack goes out of its way to say "we don't support Markdown because we think the link support is an exploit." But they just have an alternate, undocumented way to send links anyway?

Is that a bug on Slack's side? I'm trying the syntax format that you're casting to in DMs to myself, and it doesn't seem to work? Are they doing clientside escaping or something?

Don't get me wrong, I think the "people might phish links" excuse is kind of lame when there are multiple ways for them to mitigate that problem, I'm just very curious about how and why this works.

[0]: https://github.com/g3rv4/BetterSlack/commit/24ad3b57da7a9c9c...

[g3rv4]

I guess that if they consider it a vulnerability, they're going to do the check on the server side... I really hope they don't though.

If they do, I'll fix it on the extension (so only people with the extension would see the markdown links as real links).

Also: to answer your question... yes, there's an undocumented way of sending them. And yes, the client escapes `<https://url.com|the title>` to `&lt;https://url.com|the title&gt;`.

The format is the same format used by bots to generate links.

[Savageman]

I don't think it's a bug, since they've always supported links in their Web API, both for users and bots. It just happens the Slack client doesn't use that feature.

[zachsnow]

Hey this is neat! Re: injecting into Slack.app, you're right, it's a pain. I had a simple approach here: https://zachsnow.github.io/slinger/ but it needs to be updated for every version (which of course I didn't do).

It would be cool if you made it so that users could inject it manually (via enabling --dev and $.getScript() or so) into the app; I for one don't restart Slack very often, so it wouldn't be too much of a pain.

[g3rv4]

nice! yeah, the problem with dynamically loading the script is that an attacker could inject anything... and they could easily steal your slack token.

But that sounds like an amazing thing for me to use locally :)

[geekuillaume]

One of the problem I always have on Slack or other chats is the 300+ unread messages after being offline for a day or two. I tend to skip everything but sometimes I miss things I should read...

A solution?

[emddudley]

I think it's a common misunderstanding that we must read everything in Slack. You don't have to. If something's important it will come up again, or if it's directly relevant to you then someone will tag you. When someone asks about a Slack conversation you didn't see, just say you missed it. It's a better norm than being expected to stay up to the minute on every word uttered by every employee.

[weego]

That's a people problem that needs a people solution.

[bproven]

Doesn't apply to Slack, but Zulip's solution is use topics : https://zulipchat.com/hello/

[dorfsmay]

Temporary and if it needs an answer, answer only makes sense if near immediate: use IM (slack etc...)

Just an FYI that everybody needs to know or needs an answer regardless of when you can answer: use email

Information that is valid until a major change (or forever if that exists): document in your wiki or whatever documentation system you use.

When I'm back from time off, I mark all slack channels as read.

[vishnu_ks]

You should checkout Zulip https://zulipchat.com/why-zulip/

Disclaimer: I am a full time contributor at Zulip.

[bobwaycott]

Anything important enough that should not be missed should be sent in an email. Slack, IRC, and other chat-likes are additional communication channels—they shouldn’t be a primary mission-critical delivery system.

[andrewkfiedler]

I've started enforcing a thread only mentality in most of the channels at my work. It lets you easily catch up on the topics you care about.

[g3rv4]

what would you like it to happen? the extension may be able to filter the ones sent in the last N hours and adjust the number of unread... but that wouldn't solve the problem of missing things you should read.

[prolikewh0a]

Shift + Esc

[targafarian]

Would it be straightforward to do e.g. Mathjax rendering of equations delimited by dollars-signs? e.g.: $\int_a^b x$ or $$\int_a^b x$$

[g3rv4]

yeah! if you have a library that does it, you could inspect when a message is created and call the library when the message is rendered.

PRs are welcome :)

[NelsonMinar]

I like having reacji to the right of the message instead of below. Slack should steal that idea. Screenshot here: https://i.imgur.com/mDYtOy2.png

[g3rv4]

somebody on Slack is already aware of the possibility: https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/1033279901888065536

[robmccoll]

Is there a way to view and interact with multiple conversations at the same time? I want pop-up tabs or pop-out windows or something.

Slack always seems like a step backwards in chat to me.

[g3rv4]

oh, pop-out threads would be nice. I share your frustration :( and that's what compelled me to take a first stab at solving some issues.

[stunt]

Markdown support for links from users is a bad idea and just makes phishing attack easier as many organizations have public channels.

[g3rv4]

oh, an attacker could do [https://nicely-looking-url.com](https://shady-site.com). I see your point.

however, anybody with a bit of javascript knowledge can do it. I guess we need to keep educating people about the importance of checking urls?

[gcb0]

I can't believe. They now have a GUI to create "chrome.exe $url" on your desktop?! why?

[pingec]

Finally a way to ignore a user!

[brootstrap]

lol -- that angry boss who always yells things in slack chat, OUR APP IS BROKEN WE NEED TO FIX IT ASAP... see ya later sk8r , you've been silenced