VHS Talk vs Slack

Continuing the discussion from Talk stats for Feb 2015:

Slack is where all the VHS IRC chat seems to have gone (seriously, #vhs is a ghost town now) and I’m sure some of the casual chatter that might otherwise happen in the ‘general lounge’ VHS Talk category has also migrated.

If it seems too noisy, it probably ends up on Slack. If someone doesn’t want it in the Googleopticon, probably Slack. If it doesn’t feel like it’s worth an email, Slack.

The big downside of Slack is that it’s designed as a corporate chat tool, so making it as open and easy to get into as IRC is a challenge. Nice UI, though, and decent feature set overall.

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If anyone wants an invite to slack, see this post

What I don’t like is having multiple options for reaching people, with no clear advantage. I think we should retire IRC if we plan to move, but I don’t know if that’s the wisest idea, being that we are a damn hackspace, and IRC is and old school protocol that we should probably support.

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The thing is that I think it’s safe to say that every single person who was active on IRC has switched to Slack as it’s vastly superior at IRC than IRC is. :stuck_out_tongue:

You’re right that it puts us in an awkward position where we can’t abandon IRC due to legacy reasons, but it’s pretty much useless.

From what I understood from the discussions about IRC, we were having
trouble controlling the environment and unsavoury characters were involved
in it.

I think as long as you leave breadcrumbs for people to follow on how to
connect with VHS, it’s safe to move from one environment to another.
Technology evolves.

Perhaps a Bot that pings newcomers with how to connect with us now?

Any real discussion of this should probably happen in the members only section of VHS Talk, but generally there was one person who was officially banned from VHS based partly on his IRC behaviour, another person who persistently tried to skirt the edge of what he could get away with in #vhs and who has been kicked from the channel, and random people who pop in looking for l33t haxx0rz. Those last are only ever a momentary entertainment, sadly.

I don’t think controlling the environment is really an issue there anymore, although it is a little inconvenient that the channel admins are almost all inactive former VHS members.

The IRC channel’s topic is “Talk to @funvill about Vanhack slack install”, and there are a couple of us who still keep an eye on it. (Hi Ty!) Feel free to implement a bot, though. There’s a lot of good ones out there to build on.

My understanding is that VHS official business happens at GMs, through the BoD, or through VHS Talk. Everything else is just do-ocracy or chatter. I think #vhs is a good thing to have out there, even if it’s not the new hotness today. We’re only one boneheaded move by Slack Inc away from relying on IRC for chat again.

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