Technology
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omg, no. Chat apps as information repositories, really?
Look, I dislike Slack as much as the next guy, but I can't really fault them here. If you're looking through freaking chat history to find valuable information, you screwed up. And since people tend to misspell things, use shorthand and whatnot, you're most likely than not, going to have a bad time searching for that Important Thing (tm). Trust me, it's painful to do.
Use forums, use ticketing systems, heck, use emails! All of these are better at archiving information and making it browsable. More than chat apps, at any rate. Just... use chat apps for, you know, chatting.
I agree, but the reality is often either no documentation at all or chat history. Documentation takes time and effort, and employees are often disincentivised to write it as it makes them easier to replace.
Oh, I am aware. Doesn't mean I have to like it, though! But on that front, you are correct: better something than nothing.
And Slack knows that as well, which is why they hold the chat history at ransom / behind their paywall.
How are emails better than chats in that regard?
Because emails can be threaded? So it can be used as some kind of ticketing system. Newcomers can easily catch up too.
Zulip has threading, which you can even rename after you already set a topic. I don't know an email client where you can easily rename mail threads.
If you imagine a ticketing system based on mail conversations, it's not far from Zulip. You should try it.
Not only can you edit the topic of your own messages, but (if the right organization setting is enabled) you can actually change the topic of other people's messages which is really awesome for moving offtopic digressions out of a conversation. all of the messages remain visible in their original temporal order in the full stream view, but when you "narrow" to a specific topic the offtopic messages disappear.
Yeah, that's vastly superior to everything I've seen with emails. I wish mails worked like Zulip.
within a "stream" (the word zulip uses for channels/rooms/groups/etc), they have a concept of topics... which are sort of like linear email threads (without nested replies).
a proper ticketing system is nice to have, but, if you have any kind of chat then some information will inevitably end up there and only there. so the question is not if chat is a knowledge repository but rather how long it takes to find things there (and then to find related things after you find one thing). zulip's fast search and topics make this very easy.
Threaded conversations is what I was getting at, yes. Also, I'm not sure about Zulip, but emails can also be backed up and archived.
see my reply above. zulip is less of a slack clone than mattermost or rocketchat are; it has "topics" within "streams" which are a kind of threading.
besides database backups it can also export everything to static html for archival.