The author's expectations just seem wildly unrealistic, I can't find much sympathy. Signed up for a pay service with a clear limit on the trial, yet was surprised by the limit, even though he knew how many Slack users he had and knew or should have known how many messages per day they were already sending. Put his community (customers) of thousands on the Slack team, even though the advertising and economics only make sense for internal teams. He is trying so hard to make his own mistake sound like Slack's fault.<p>Also, previous discussion: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9754626" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9754626</a>
There's a perfect alternative:<p>* Free<p>* Handles thousands of users seamlessly<p>* Archived via bot same as free Slack<p>* No noticeable performance hit for high user volumes<p>* Wide variety of interfaces and integration bots to choose from<p>* Widely deployed and trusted across tech communities<p>It's called IRC.<p>Edit: I can tell more people are encountering challenges using Slack these days. In the past, a suggestion to use IRC would have been downvoted to hell and back!<p>A lot of people seem hung up on the history, file sharing, or some other feature that Slack has, so I thought I'd take a moment to expand on my ideal setup and how they translate from Slack:<p>* Long-lived documentation and important team knowledge: Wiki pages (which I prefer even when using Slack and pins or history search are available). Full history of edits is visible and it's easy to access/search.<p>* Discussions involving a large number of stakeholders: Email. Threads and the async nature of the protocol make it well-suited to discussions when users aren't all online at the same time and the discussion is more thoughtful and isn't moving quickly. Slack threads suck replies aren't very visible and history scrolls quickly in active channels.<p>* Discussions involving outages, current tasks, and other immediate needs: IRC. It's real time, cross-platform, etc. History can be archived for later searching, but CHAT HISOTRY != DOCUMENTATION. Post-mortems and that sort of thing should end up in a wiki or similar.<p>* File sharing can be done via some other service with a link pasted into chat. One extra step to paste the link manually isn't a big deal.
Sounds like most of the issues were due to not paying for the product. Which is fair given Slack's freemium model but I wonder if they were throttling free users after a certain point, causing performance issues. If I was this guy I would've reached out to Slack's sales team and explained the situation to see if they could offer a compelling deal. They might've seen a huge discount as worthwhile given it would get 5000+ coders using Slack regularly, many of whom would then promote in other companies.
Like the author, I'm always "that guy" who plays a game or uses a program in a way that seems reasonable, or optimal to me (and often is very efficient) but is so unusual that the program eventually "falls off the edge of the world" and starts crashing all over the place because none of the beta-testers ever did anything quite like what I'm doing with the program.<p>Like this guy, I usually don't know at first just what is so unusual about my behavior, and often I never do find out. My favorite game (not yet a decade old) crashes every several minutes for me, playing the way I like. I just save extremely frequently and keep right on playing it.<p>The moral: Where business is concerned: "Be a smart herder" - don't make any false moves, or adopt odd implementations or uses of key software products (or software controlled products) because the minute your behavior is similar to only 1/1000 users (sometimes 1/100 users), <i>you are using the equivalent of an alpha or beta product</i>, and you should count on getting zero product support. Your complaints will, likely, not even be properly comprehended or will be understood, but labeled "impossible" and abruptly closed (I'm looking at you Open Office.)
Speaking of Slack, what's an alternative with a different pricing model?<p>We have a core team that's always around, and for that Slack pricing is fine, but we have a significant number of "drive by" users that aren't worth paying $60 per year.<p>We're generally happy with Slack's features, so which are the similar services that charge something different than per-user?
Hm. Well, that made me a bit concerned to start, as I'm working on a Slack-based hack-and-slash RPG [1] that I'm planning on running entirely on their free tier, but I'm pretty sure that their use cases differ from mine significantly. I'm not worried about message archives (as it's just game history), and I have @here/@all locked down significantly.<p>The "max user size" thing is a bit worrisome, but MMOs have a history of sharding to solve that problem anyway, so hopefully that shouldn't be a problem either. (Players will be able to chat together in a shared Discourse forum, so sharding shouldn't really hurt community-building.)<p>I wonder if any progress has been made since then to support larger teams, though? It's been quite a while, and Slack's engineering team has been cranking out a lot of great features and improvements lately.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.slackandslash.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.slackandslash.com</a>
* Enterprise Grid || <a href="https://slack.com/enterprise" rel="nofollow">https://slack.com/enterprise</a><p>Worth noting that 1) the author's expectations were wildly unrealistic. 2) Slack has since come out with better tools to manage large teams.
I switched over a large group of friends from using a gazillion hangouts to slack and it's mostly been an improvement. That being said, there's a lot less of us: around 30.<p>I'm definitely disappointed to hear about this. The pricing model sucks for us as well since it means $60 a head to add someone to the friend group if we wanted to pay for slack. If we could pay a fixed price and get a slightly better message history and more integrations, I'd gladly pay it, but per-head is just ridiculous.<p>We also use Discord for online gaming since it's easier to invite people outside the group. It's been absolutely fantastic, but we had issues with some people not having access at work.
This was very similar to the Reactiflux move to Discord:<p><a href="https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/10/19/reactiflux-is-moving-to-discord.html" rel="nofollow">https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/10/19/reactiflux-...</a> (October 2015)<p>To be fair, Slack never really said it was made to support that many users. Even in my team of less than 20 on the free tier, we hit the 10,000 message limit really quickly. I can't imagine how that must have been with 8 thousand users.
This has been a sore point for many communities (see the Digital Nomads + React communities).<p>But if Slack were smart about it, they'll realise that there's an opportunity here. They are a very well-funded company and it wouldn't hurt to spend some resources to beef up their current code/infrastructure or to even spin up a separate product that they can profit from.