Slack's authentication flow is the dumbest I've ever had the misfortune of using. I'm a member of multiple Slack organizations, and it needs <i>one login per organization</i>. I can't just have a single email address and join whatever org I want, I have to remember <i>which</i> email address I used for each one, otherwise I can't log in!<p>I have multiple email addresses and don't use a specific one every time, so I have managed to lock myself out of many orgs because I just can't remember which email address I used.<p>If you click the "forgot my email" link, they go "have you forgotten which email address you used to log in to which org? Just tell us your email address and we'll tell you which orgs it's logged in to", which is exactly the <i>opposite</i> of what I want!<p>It's such a clusterfuck that I just avoid joining new orgs nowadays because I know I'll never be able to log in again.
When this started rolling out it caused havoc for us. Without any warning that this was happening half of the people in our org got their display_name set to their full name, and the other half got their handle. For no apparent reason.<p>Within the technology parts of our org everyone knows each other by handle, and we still let people pick their own handle when they join. It's even pretty common to only know people by handle and not their real/full name. Monday morning and all of a sudden you can't ping a colleague anymore by @username, you have no idea why and now you need to know or find out what their first name is. Eventually that got fixed for everyone but it made Monday worse than usual.<p>I'm also not sure how this is going to interact with Enterprise Grid though. Since display names aren't unique you can get two people in a channel with the same display name. So if you now ping @John The Ripper, does it bug both, does it not go anywhere?
If I read this correctly, the "Enterprise Grid" section hints at one technical reason for this move. Slack recently announced[0] a new feature that allows multiple teams, err "Workspaces", to share a channel. This violates the uniqueness of @usernames within the namespace of the shared channel, e.g. both teams having a "@john".<p>This announcement anticipates (a) getting developers to use surrogate UIDs instead of @username for mentions, and (b) that their clients will only use display names in the future and rely on specific UI elements to distinguish ambiguous ones.<p>[0] <a href="https://medium.com/slack-developer-blog/network-effects-getting-ready-for-shared-channels-600b7cc776df" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/slack-developer-blog/network-effects-gett...</a>
I think they're missing the point, Twitter got the display name / username dichotomy right:<p>Display Name: what everyone sees <i>next to</i> your username, no guarantees that you don't change it every 5 minutes though...<p>username: something short you choose and change rarely, can be cool, memorable, fun, and quite creative, always unique<p>[Real Name: who cares, often necessary for work tools even though email ought to be enough]
In general the idea of a username is slowly being killed of across the web. In the 90s when I got my first computer few would have been "crazy" enough to user their real name. The anonymity of the web back then was so much fun. Google and Facebook really started to kill that off and nowadays most sites just use an email address for a login if they are not already using your Gmail or Facebook for auth.<p>Long live the username on hacker news.
I have no idea what the product manager was thinking here... Can someone elaborate why this "feature" - which implies potentially a lot of confusion - benefits most users?
The best solution for the name collision problem that I've seen so far is used by Discord and Battle.net, both in the gaming space where username is often much more prominent than the real name.<p>You can set your username to whatever you want (e.g. "jakebasile"). You then get a randomly assigned four digit number appended to the end (e.g. #5024). To add someone as a friend, you need the full username#0000, but thereafter it is not needed. To mention someone in a chat (in Discord) you type @ and then start typing - it will match on either the user name or display name, but only complete the user name. The key is that when you actually send the message it will show that user's display name in chat and notify them as you'd expect. Display names in discord can be overridden at the server level and in Battle.net games there is the concept of Real ID instead which you can choose to share your real name on a per person basis.<p>In both of these situations you are only using one account and one username across either multiple games or multiple servers. This avoids having to use many different accounts within the same application which is one of my primary gripes with Slack.
So, they're making things more annoying for most uses I have for Slack, without providing any benefits for the uses I have for Slack (I get that it may provide some benefit for others).<p>Sounds like it's time to say a lingering farewell to Slack.
That is the most verbose and confusing post about a seemingly simple change I've ever read.<p>"What's changing? Everything and nothing is changing" really doesn't help.
Sad to see this go... We use @username from external systems that feed into Slack. For example, putting a comment on a Zendesk ticket using @username alerts a person who would normally never pop into Zendesk to have a look.
I don't fully understand what's changing: Slack always had the option to set a "real" name. Is it simply going to transparently translate the name token within messages to whatever preferred representation an organization choses? If so, why is this being presented as "the death of the username"? Or is it more complicated than this? (Perhaps an accommodation to integrate with existing directory systems in larger corporate environments?)<p>Does Slack feel like having usernames somewhat visible and end-user facing makes the product "too nerdy" for a general audience?
what the heck? this is the stupidest move I've ever seen from Slack. Combine this with a lack of using floating windows (like Messenger on Android) and it's clear that the company is run by operations and sales --- not product. There is clear space to move in on Slack's terroritory
I didn't get it...<p>so how do I mention someone now? I still have to type @ for autocomplete, and even if I type the realy name [return] completes to @username...
Not only are they phasing out @username, they are removing the very simple /msg username – I now must type /msg @username and hit enter twice to initiate a DM. It's annoying.
They also removed your username/display name from your default highlight strings. We often just use names with no @, and this week we noticed that other people were no longer getting pinged for those. Now you have to go to your preferences and explicitly add your display name to the list of strings you want to be notified about.
I don't understand what they mean by "Unfortunately, an undocumented approach to mentioning users — <@username> — no longer functions. Please reference with the user ID format (<@U123>) instead".<p>Surely they're not saying slack users need to manually type opaque numeric identifiers to properly mention other users? That would be ridiculous.