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Comment by richthegeek | Hacker News Reader

So would there be a use-case for a combined bot+app that you can connect some storage to (S3, FTP) which archives all channel message history in a searchable form? It could make it visible to search engines, searchable by humans, linkable to people outside of slack, and shouldn't take up very much storage space.

Should be quite trivial to build also, and cheap enough to run as a bit of charity if projects pay for their own storage.

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For open source developers logs of private 1:1 discussions are also highly valuable, so this would only be a bandaid.

The last company I worked for used small channels for this issue instead of going 1:1, which was more or less reserved for private talk

Gotta admit, as a workaround for the deficiency of "doesn't have local client logging", that one's really funny.

Local client logging doesn't solve all problems (though yes, i still want to be able to grep text files if I choose).

The two I regularly encounter (which shared storage fixes) is either moving to a different device (or trying to remember which ones have which bits of history on) and also integrating new team members.

The latter is especially important if you're doing anything technical/support related; if you've had 2 days of discussions and want to add someone else in, they need the history, not for you to try and cherry pick the important bits of the last few hours to then fail to get them upto speed.

This would be quite the workaround though, completely evading the root of the problem (slack).

It's trivial to write such a thing, but why would Slack allow that application in their apps?

It would be useless for private organisations - the entire purpose is to make ephemeral chat publicly available to search engines.

Slack might cut it off, but they gain nothing by doing it.

Several slack groups already do this.

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