Hacker News Reader

Comment by ogre_codes | Hacker News Reader

> just fucking use email.

I get you. But also:

- Email doesn't retain context very well. If I dig back through my email I might have all of the emails in a thread, or maybe not.

- Likewise, I can't send someone a link to a previous emailed conversation so it makes for poor documentation. I can forward an individual email, but not the comment in context.

- Email is not easy to index or post up for reference. You can't link it from a wiki or other documentation for example.

An internal mailing list with archiving would solve many of these issues and might be the best option, but it's a slightly different solution.

View on HN

Basecamp does this well, especially version 2, which integrated with email. With version 2 you could have topics in Basecamp which you could post directly do or email and it was searchable and linkable. It was even possible to post messages which were optionally emailed to clients, with their response becoming part of the thread history. Really the best of both worlds. Unfortunately they removed the email feature in Basecamp 3 (and my company upgraded) so we can't do that anymore, but older projects retain their history.

Yeah, basecamp is pretty good at this. It is a pretty solid tool for building projects where having communications and documentation is intermixed is important.

I didn't realized they removed the email piece... seems like a downgrade. Particularly for projects where you have fairly casual participants.

Mailing lists is the answer.

- Achievable

- Searchable

- Linkable

- Asynchronous

- Accessible

I like using Slack and we use it heavily with my team, but I agree it has issues.

Meanwhile, we've been using mailing lists for established open source projects for years for all of these reasons.

I've commented this too much in this thread, but it's important: Zulip solves all this, has other advantages and a fast and extremely usable interface.

Is there anything in particular you don't like about Zulip?

The UI looks a bit outdated, but it's so fast and usable that I don't mind the aesthetics at all. It had some annoyances like the inability to move topics, bit AFAIK they solved that with the latest release.

There isn't really much else I don't like about it, I never stop being amazed by how great the keyboard navigation is and how much the "river" of messages improves usability.

Thanks for the reply!

I'm intrigued by the Guest option. Do you think it's a good way to communicate with the clients during longer projects?

Yeah, I've used that and it worked well (though I haven't used it extensively). As long as clients don't get confused by the UI, it's great, but it might take a bit of onboarding due to the different UI (though in its core it's just "Slack, but everything is a message thread").

This is why most replies include quotes.

But yeah for groups you need a mailing list with an archive. It's still better than most IM apps IMO.

Yes, but quotes are pretty limited in usefulness, particularly since different clients quote email differently and threads can get shredded quickly.

> It's still better than most IM apps IMO.

Yes, but you are trading one set of limits for another.

It's a bit surprising that at this point we haven't standardized on something better than essentially IRC versus email.

(Ok not surprising, frustrating)

We have IMAP URLs that address some of this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com