[solved] Replacing Slack by Discord

As we've all noticed, slack is making the service less interesting for our needs by limiting the visual message to the last 90 days. Personally, I've used slack to go back and search for stuff that goes way further back than that, certainly now that the amount of slack messages had dwindled, mostly because of that restriction I guess.

My goal was to figure out how to import our slack history into the ImpressCMS forums, but after a quick analysis I came to the conclusion that the data structures are too different. Slack doesn't really work with topics and posts. It can, but it's seldom used that way. And iForum isn't meant to keep the chronology of the topics in order. In a new version of iForum (or its successor) we could figure out a way to handle that, but that's not for tomorrow, and I would like to have this information, and a more active discussions, back up by tomorrow. Tomorrow, that is 19th of august 2024

I looked around and I have setup a Discord server for ImpressCMS, onto which I am now currently migrating the data from our slack channels. The import is running, and I'm up to 22 september 2014, so I guess it will still take a while until it has finished. Once that's OK, I'll make the server details available below.

update : we're in 2015 now. Still uploading data.

I'm looking into the github and ohdear webhooks as well in the meantime.

We are 4 hours into the migration of the data (we're talking of a 6MB Slack export here) and we're still going strong. Currently busy importing the #devel channel from Slack.

Thank you, David! Recovering the data from Slack and organizing it will give us some more visibility into past conversations.

Even though we can't easily migrate the channels and conversations from Slack to iForum (currently), would it make sense for all new conversations to be maintained here?

I don't know. Real-time chat has different discussions and needs than in a forum. The 'hey, how are you and how is the weather?' messages don't really go well on forums I think

A temporary link is available here to test : https://discord.gg/uTu7cdchCd

The import is being throttled, so I'll resume the remaining channels tomorrow. The most important ones are already there

Yeah. forums wouldn't work well for instantaneous conversations. Private messages or email also have some delays. For us - we're separated by a lot of time zones, so when I'm posting this, you're asleep. When I get home from work and can sit at the computer for a while, it's 7pm GMT-5. Just so we know people are listening, this was on my suggested posts today - https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-move-slack-archive-to-discord/

yes, the new restrictions on Slack are pushing 'freeloaders' away, but I suspect that is the underlying reason Slack is now becoming tougher for non-paying users. The era of free money is over, and all these tech companies are now facing the harsh reality that someone needs to pay their bills. Reducing the bill by reducing the non-paying users is an easy step in that way.