Slack to Bring Back Optional Markdown Editor

A work colleague sent Slack some feedback about wanting the old editor back and they replied a few hours ago. Here's an excerpt with slightly more insight on a timeline.

"We don't have a specific release date to share right now - it's this team's top and only priority, however, and we expect to have it available on desktop within a couple of weeks, with Android following shortly thereafter."

Props to Slack for listening to the feedback :)

Reply I've just received, can't fault them for responding to this so quick, even if the initial response was to say nothing could be done.

> We really appreciate your feedback, and we hear your frustration. We're sorry for the impact this is having on your ability to communicate with your team and on your overall productivity. We made a mistake by forcing everyone into this feature without providing an opt-out for customers like you: people for whom the existing behaviour was working just fine.

> We've started working on a preference that will let you return to the previous message composer. We don't have a specific release date to share right now — it's this team's top and only priority, however, and we expect to have it available on the desktop within a couple of weeks, with Android following shortly thereafter. >We will follow up with another note when this option is available to you, and we'll include instructions on how to enable it.

> Again, we're sorry for the disruption and we're grateful for the feedback. We missed the mark on this feature! We will do our best to learn from this and avoid similar mistakes in the future.

I read a bunch of articles last night about how horrible the change was and I dreaded getting on Slack this morning. But it was honestly fine — the code syntax worked as I expected with backticks and stars/underscore still work fine as well. They just trigger the WYSIWYG look inline. I didn’t have to modify my behavior, so I’m fine with the change.

> After the decision was criticized by O’Dwyer and others (and after this article was published), Slack told Motherboard that it would switch gears and provide an option to bring the old interface back.