Archive for Adobe Devs slack group

https://adobedevs.com

A sore point of our Adobe Devs slack community is that this community is just a loose swarm of cooperative developers, and we have to make do with a free Slack group.

That works well, up to a point: we only get access to the most recent 10,000 messages.

Any older messages roll beyond the event horizon and disappear into a black hole.

To remove that limitation, Slack wants some money.

Fair enough, but the issue is that Slack does not cater for us. Our community does not have any ‘substance’. We’re not a company, we’re not a non-profit. We’re just a swarm of friendly, but solitary worker bees.

Slack has no facilities for individual, per-user payments. They assume every entity they deal with is some form of commercial or legal entity. Something with a postal address or incorporation address or a head office.

Slack does offer special dispensation for non-profits, but their definition of non-profit is very narrow. Our swarm ain’t it.

We’ve been humming and hawing about this for a long time, and I’ve now decided to cut through and fix the problem.

I clicked the ‘Upgrade’ button in Slack, and they reckon we have 60 active users, which would cost US$4,800 per year or $480 per month to remove the 10,000 message limitation.

My plan (now completed):
– Take out a one-month subscription for all of us. US$480 ain’t cheap and makes a dent in my finances, especially now that Covid-19 has made a lot of things grind to a halt, but I think I can wiggle it.
Until someone bit the bullet, nothing would have happened.
– Once the subscription runs, extract all messages in all channels and put them up for public access:
https://adobedevs.com/
You need a name and password which is published in the AdobeDevs Slack, in channel #archive-howtoaccess.
– Cancel the subscription again before the month is up
– All I need to do further is to regularly re-fetch a batch of the latest messages before we accumulate 10,000 additional messages. Every 2-3 months I’ll update my archive, and we should be good without any additional costs, except for my time.

So, for the month of April 2020, everyone on the AdobeDevs slack group can enjoy access to all messages.

And after that, you can access the archive here:
https://adobedevs.com/

After I did all that, Chris Ryland put out a call to ask subscribers to chip in to help me cover the US$480 subscription fee. And as it so happens: a bunch of people jumped in, and instead of being US$480 out of pocket, I ended up US$41.05 richer than when I started.

Thank you, Sergey Kritskiy, CtrlSoftware, Иван Степанов, Roland Dreger, Joost Huizinga, Brett Kizner, Derrick Barth, Chris Ryland, Creative Scripts, Joseph Portell!