What Slack might learn from its Open Source alternative
I love that there are some other tools coming up to challenge Slack -- hopefully this will put pressure on Slack to up their game.  Slack has been... very slow to fix bugs &#x2F; add new features.    They&#x27;re starting to feel like Microsoft... like they don&#x27;t move fast, aren&#x27;t trying to improve anything, and don&#x27;t care about customer feedback.<p>I love Slack, but some of my gripes with Slack:<p>* I can&#x27;t spell check from a Post in Slack.  Posts would be great for taking notes, but they lack order.  It doesn&#x27;t have to be full-on Confluence &#x2F; Wiki style, but being able to add some classifications to Posts would be helpful.  And in-line spell check... Every other tool everywhere supports this, but not Slack Posts.<p>* Posts and Chats use different formatting markup.  Why not just use Markup for both?<p>* Channel names being forced into lower case and very short character counts... Why can&#x27;t I use a longer name for a channel and just wrap the name in the display?  Why does it have to be all lower-case without spaces?  Why isn&#x27;t there a folder structure to the channels to keep all my clients &#x2F; focuses grouped?<p>* Slack forces me to put Bots and People in the same channel and it gives them both equal visibility.  I should be able to add a #bot or something and have those messages be something I can search for, or something that shows up in the sidebar, but not something that talks over people.  Their current work-around is to use two channels, one for people and one for bots... but making sure your team is added to every channel... it sucks.  FlowDoc does a better job of this, and if it was built the way they do it I wouldn&#x27;t have to search multiple channels to find the info I could just search one place.<p>* File storage in Slack is a nightmare.  Try finding a file again a month later.  If I upload the same file name why can&#x27;t it just version the file like Box or RedPen does?  Nope, it just uploads the same file again... tagging a user or # doesn&#x27;t actually tag the the file the way you want it to... so I can&#x27;t even really search by those things.<p>* When you click &quot;Open&quot; a file you have to log in again?  That&#x27;s so busted.  I can download a file, but if I&#x27;m on a phone and I click &quot;preview&quot; it prompts me to sign in -- extra tedious for users who enable 2FA.  Security doesn&#x27;t have to be that tedious, just let me open files without a login -- if I can download them but I can&#x27;t open them directly it&#x27;s not security, it&#x27;s just an annoyance.<p>* The default integrations in Slack kind of suck.  I know that&#x27;s not 100% Slack... but why can&#x27;t I get updates when someone makes a change to a Google Drive file, or creates files in a Google Drive &#x2F; Box &#x2F; Dropbox folder?<p>* Hashtags are busted.  Why don&#x27;t # work like they do in Twitter where I can search for them after?  Having # be rooms isn&#x27;t good.  Nobody gets that to start... I&#x27;d so much rather be able to tag a conversation (oh and have a threaded conversation) around a # and then have that # show up in the channel column...<p>* User management is lame.  As the administrator, why can&#x27;t I go into a user&#x27;s profile and add them to multiple rooms at once?  Or why can&#x27;t I add a bunch of people to multiple rooms at once?  Also why can&#x27;t I lock down user names -- I don&#x27;t want my users to change their user names to political statements or stupid handles, if I set it First.Last I want it to stay that way.  The last thing I want is for one of my developers to rename himself @ZombieGoatMaster4DonaldTrump and have that be something that is shown to a client.<p>* Mobile isn&#x27;t consistent with Desktop.  Why don&#x27;t the channel lists in Slack sort the same way on Desktop and Mobile?  Why does the + sign mean join a channel on Mobile, but create a channel on desktop?  It&#x27;s so inconsistent it&#x27;s like they don&#x27;t even bother having their different product managers talk or work with the same UX team.<p>Anyway really glad people are producing alternatives to Slack.  Going to check this out, thanks!