Ask HN: Have you tried using forum software in place of Slack at work?

[dmarlow]

The recent submission on Slack (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34540085) got me thinking about how using something like Discourse would look like. Having something like ChatGPT summarizing things as you go would also be useful. If you've done it, how did it go? Any interesting lessons learned?

[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

[matt_s]

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.

[walterbell]

IRCcloud ($50/year) and Matrix/Element (free) provide unified clients for Slack and IRC.

[inactiveseller]

I create this account to answer. Yes. In 2010 Aprox i was at charge of a team of four junior programmers and a female documentator. The business was related to Mexican IRS things, mangaing sensitive information. I create am open forum MYBB for all of them and a CATEGORY with my team name, and a forum for each one. Example : Junior 1 forum, he can see and create, but not edit passing x time. He cant see the junior 2,3 or 4 forum. For me and upper management was transparent. I can see the individual forums and general, and documentation was in another subforum.

I ask all the people to say daily what they do (general manner), biggest problem, and biggest acheivement. If they had problem with sales asking suare circles, they put as a problem, if they have problem with internet put there, if they need ask for a schedule change to go to baby, bank , Mexican IRS or similar they do there.

Other forums in the category include tips, code, snippets, rules, etc. Was a complet success. We got a surprise inspection from partners and customers and pass all the security , traceability, scrum and agiles controls. This last aprox two whole years.

Two months later i was demoted/changed to other area of API and special projects because i refuse to obbey against the law / Mexican IRS orders, and internal desorganization. They do the order to not use more, but not erase. Aprox six months later, planning my exit of the business, i ask public in mails permissions to erase all the repositories / forums / database of that era, because have sensible information, that was true. i get authorization and erase all.

The better part was two weeks later we receive a surprise inspection and get 0/10, yes, zero. The people in my old position was a friend of a founder and use the time playing electric guitar in the office. I leave when they ask me to fix all the mess of three years, without power, all responsability, for the same money, but too they ask me for erase all the referential integrity. I quit because in an IRS related business, was suicidal.

But yes, the forum appl yvery well but need take time to proper put levels of visbility and edition.

[fragmede]

Thank you so much for sharing your story! I'm sorry it ended so poorly. Hopefully you are doing better these days. Would you mind sharing more about how the forum was successful?

[cr3ative]

Slack and A Forum are not comparable. Slack is largely for real-time communication which is rarely referenced historically, a forum is more of a knowledge store.

[fragmede]

Everything is comparable! Some comparisons don't make sense because of how different they are, but Slack vs eg Discourse (not Discord) are in a similar enough realm of human interaction that it's worth taking the time to make the comparison. Especially because Slack is seen as the be-all end-all of where things live these days.

[ComputerGuru]

There are forums with real time components to them (live updating, online indicators, etc). That just makes slack a worse forum.

[mjrbrennan]

Disclaimer: I work at Discourse. We discuss all our work on an internal Discourse forum, it makes everything much easier to track and long form slow lane discussion is encouraged and baked into Discourse.

We also have chat built in now, with a strong emphasis on interoperability between chat channels and topics so discussions can be easily moved between the fast and slow lane. I love the way we work and I always feel like communicating with the rest of my colleagues is seamless.

The blog post on our recent 3.0 release goes into this more if you are interested https://blog.discourse.org/2023/01/discourse-3-0-is-here/

[dmarlow]

Thanks for sharing! I had no idea this was possible. I think this makes things much more interesting.

[v3ss0n]

We use Zulip and productivity sky rocketed, it's Cross between forums and chat and we replaced task tracking too.

[gardenhedge]

I would love a proper work forum. Unfortunately, my work place does not have an async culture at all. People would respond to forum posts with phone calls.

[cpach]

Fly does this and it seems to work well for them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30380570

At my workplace we have Slack, but not Discourse. We do have Confluence though, which works quite good for stuff that needs to be referenced in future.

[sethammons]

My experience with Confluence is it only works if you have a link to the document. Search is utterly useless. The only search I've found worse is Google Docs. I can be in a meeting and search direct quotes or titles of documents being shared on screen and they will not come up in gdoc's search; I have to request a link every time. Even for documents I've previously opened.

[fragmede]

At Google there is an internal stack overflow-ish system so that questions have a focal point. You need a modern FAQ system to deduplicate work as much as possible. 30 different people wandering into a slack channel asking the same question is such a waste of everyone's time! Lesson learned is you can't live without it!

I'd recommend also taking a look at Loom. They replace meetings with video recordings so you can avoid meetings, with less overhead, and get more information shared.

[hiidrew]

Quill was like a cross between slack and some forum functions. Never used it at work but did for another project. Sadly was bought and decommissioned by Twitter.

[mozman]

IRC is the best workplace communication tool IMO

[eurticket]

What forum software is still viable?

[tn1]

Things like phpBB, MyBB, or even commercial ones like XenForo are extremely customizable and integrate well with almost any auth system

[readonthegoapp]

Jive Software?

https://www.jivesoftware.com/

Haven't used it lately tho.

I hit the video link on their page and the page just seems to reload. Chrome android mobile.

[2Gkashmiri]

isnt discourse good enough?

[paulryanrogers]

Simple Machines

[Waterluvian]

Slack is more like Sametime Connect

[2Gkashmiri]

boo.. that would be so uncool

/s