FIRSTCodes: New Slack chatroom for FRC software developers!

[Cel Skeggs]

Originally Posted by Peter Johnson

The concept is good, but I'm not sure Slack is the right tool for this. Slack is great for relatively small teams where everyone knows each other in real life and you have relatively tight management control, but it has very limited tools for more "public" membership and appears to not really be designed for that application. For example, you can't restrict people from changing their display name, so it's easy for someone to play the Ender's Game trick of adding a space to their name to appear like someone else. Easy to deal with in a small team, but difficult to manage in a larger semi-anonymous group.

Slack is not the perfect tool for this, but I've been part of other large Slack communities and am aware of both the limitations and ways to address them. I am aware that moderation work can be harder with a case like this.

The most significant issue with Slack for communities is that large Slack groups have limits on their maximum size (around 8 thousand members) and only a very limited scrollback unless you pay a significant amount of money. This isn't perfect, but that's why we also have Chief Delphi for longer-term and more public posts.

Originally Posted by jds2001

I'll stand and be contrary here - first, the Slack invite link expired, so I can't get on. Some large open source communities use Slack for their primary means of communication - whether that's a good fit or not I'm not sure, as I'm not actively involved in the one I'm a member of (Kubernetes).

For the invite problem, there's some open source stuff (this is an example) that will handle doing the invites for you - you can also simply allow non-admin users to invite others (which may be all you need for this).

Yes - I plan to set up an invite automation solution at some point, but that's going to have to wait. Non-admins are already allowed to invite others in the current Slack, but that doesn't mean that anyone has used that feature.

New invite link!