I agree with most of what you're saying here, but this didn't resonate with my experience:
> basically unsearchable after a few days
Recently, a coworker asked me for more context about a pull request I had authored 14 months ago. Within minutes I was able to search Slack for relevant discussions, stakeholders, and reasoning.
I left a message in a channel 20 days ago, but I didn't remember the exact content. I had to skip back in the channel (took a while, slack paginates and there was a lot of content), and then I had to mouse-drag to even highlight the text to copy. Incredibly inefficient. I need a chat bot to record our messages the same way we used irc bots!
If you're a Slack admin, you can export a dump of the chat history. Such dumps are nominally for import into another group-chat system, but—given that the dump is just a tarball of newline-delimited JSON events, one file per channel—it's very easy to parse through in pretty much any language.
And, of course, if you have a public Slack community, there's nothing stopping you from taking regular dumps and baking them into one-per-day HTML pages, and then putting the HTML files up somewhere where Google can find and index them...
> there's nothing stopping you from taking regular dumps and baking them into one-per-day HTML pages, and then putting the HTML files up somewhere where Google can find and index them...
Is there a reason why Slack doesn't just have a setting that enables logging to a local file on disk?
> basically unsearchable after a few days
Recently, a coworker asked me for more context about a pull request I had authored 14 months ago. Within minutes I was able to search Slack for relevant discussions, stakeholders, and reasoning.