Does anyone else here lament that so much great info here is locked up in Slack, not searchable from the outside? There's a new solution we should perhaps consider: https://www.linen.dev. It's a new free service to make slack content publicly searchable, which can then be thus findable by Google, etc.. I learned of it today from another community I follow (pulumi) who did a blog post today on how they are using it to solve this very problem. I will acknowledge there's not much info on the linen site--maybe more is offered once one does signup. You can at least see what the linen search ui would look like for the pulumi community slack here. Ours would be https://www.linen.dev/s/cfml (but it does not work for now). Notice it also offers an easy way for folks to join the slack...another win, for folks who would find it via google, etc. I can't imagine that anyone would feel that info here should NOT be web-searchable. But even if there IS some complaint, I wonder if "the needs of the many" might outweigh the concerns of a few, to paraphrase Spock. Or if we could put to a vote or something. Our challenge may be that nobody really is "in control" of the CFML slack to decide or hold that vote or implement that change. But I wanted to put this up for discussion...even if it may take weeks, months, or years to "make it happen" for whatever reason.

Something similar was brought up on another community. I think that there could be decent info extracted from the slack, will people actually use it I would have concerns. But the biggest concern at the other community was who owns it, and what can be done with it. Especially on a free community with so little management. How does one request their data to be removed? Who is responsible for it? Etc. I haven't read through everything but I'd say if we go forward with something like this it should be a going forward thing that is displayed somewhere. Something like “Data on this slack is exported to pulumi” so people know that it is being archived and is being plugged into the big google machine.

Lonnie, just to clarify first, Pulumi is simply another community using the feature. It's linen.dev which is the tool. And yes, I acknowledged both "who owns this slack" question, and the possible "data privacy" concern...but really, why would anyone here think their info is "private", when anyone can join the slack? This is where I said that the needs of the many (to access the treasure trove of knowledge shared here) would seem to outweigh the needs of the few (some who may cry "you've violated my privacy"). Of course, the devil is in the details. If that's really just some generic fear, I'd press for a specific point to demonstrate it, which it would seem should be assessed. Again by who here? I'm not trying to set myself up as either the police or an administrator. I just know that it's easy in a case like this for some to error TOO vehemently on the side of caution. I mean, if one writes a post in the Adobe or Lucee communities, that content is web searchable--and I'm not aware of any warning about that or permission being sought. It's the nature of online communities. (FWIW, in the case of the Ortus communities, the titles of discussion threads are at least web-searchable, since they show up on the communities topic pages, like this one--which google does find. The content within topics is NOT searchable, which could be a discourse default or a conscious choice by the Ortus community managers.)

Interesting option, thanks Charlie. As someone on a free account here (we don't officially use Slack at work, but this group is quite valuable to me), it would be nice to be able to search back further than free accounts allow. But there's one possible rub: Slack itself offers that visibility in a paid tier, so undercutting that may be a TOS violation, maybe, or at least potentially unwelcome from their corner. Note that I totally made up that concern, and also that if this service exists, they may have negotiated something with Slack. If not, I assume Slack is aware of it, and hasn't so far made a stink or changed their policy or locked them out, so this may be a non-issue.

The Clojurians community on Slack battled with this issue for years and evaluated lots of alternative services for chat -- but most of the active users prefer Slack, even with the lack of history. Eventually, someone wrote a bot that copies every message to an external database and that is web-searchable. You have to invite the bot to each new channel that is created, but that's no big deal. Then someone set up a free community on Zulip -- which grants free "full" plans to open source project communities (so CF would not qualify) -- and created a bot that copies every message to Zulip. Late last year, we got in the ear of Slack's CEO (on Twitter!) and asked them to sponsor our community and give us Pro for free -- which they did, for a year, and we can reapply each year.

To @User comment about other "forums" being searchable, You sign up for those sites and create accounts there. It isn't a third party taking your name, voice, and comments and posting to their own system, so I don't hold them to being similar. But also I am not entirely against some kind of searchable system for slack answers, but I definitely think that it should be a per channel setting and that there needs to be documentation or bot integrations (maybe linen.dev provides that?) that inform current users and also new users that while in Slack their comments are being hoisted to a third party system and potentially a way to opt out or a way to request data be managed.

Yes, and in fact, on Clojurians we did have a case of a user who, for valid and specific reasons, needed to have their entire message history removed -- and they ended up having to also work with the folks hosting the public log website and the folks administrating the Zulip chat because their messages had also been posted there as well as Slack. So it is a very real concern about privacy.

Yes and in all honesty, a person shouldn't have to define a "valid and specific" reason to want to request their data to be removed. It is one of the reasons I am not extremely happy with Slack's policy. Having to get a second person involved means that could cause a person to have have to divulge information to the org owner when it should be a request between the person and slack to request their data be removed from the slack servers and the orgs slack. Obviously owner of the org should be able to request it be removed from their org as well. And I don't think you Sean would require much convincing, it is just an extra step a person shouldn't have to take if they wish to leave a slack channel and have their data go with them.

There are so many great conversations going on here. and I regularly bookmark them or even copy paste to a private onenote collection. Yet I know I have lost some convos because 3 months passed. Slack community rocks and I would opt-in to "nothing is private - post at own risk".

Thanks for the thoughts, guys. Like you, Sean, I signed up to see what we may learn. (I'd acknowledged also in my first post how little info they had. I really had tried hard to anticipate all the issues folks might be tempted to raise on initial consideration). And as for the thoughts you guys have added, I would expect linen.dev to iron those out (with slack on tos, with users of their service on accommodating opt-outs, etc) , if they have not already done so. We shall see. As much as anything, I raised the issue to make folks aware that there IS this new option, which they may want to consider for still other slack communities they are in. To me, the lack of public exposure of slack community content to search engines is a HUGE disadvantage to the massive shift many have made to slack. Its approach to things may solve some problems, but it creates bigger ones, at least in my opinion. I realize mine is just one. But this issue is one of the reasons I don't have the same enthusiasm to contribute here. The number of people it benefits is far reduced. First, even for community members, they have to see any particular raft of knowledge floating by. Then as for those NOT in the slack, the chances of their learning what's shared on that particular matter are practically non-existent. I long to see that solved.

The help I have received here and the help I have contributed with has been great. I still much rather be here than where I was before I found slack. Before slack, I really thought the cfml community was non-existent or dying really. Its fresh and popping in here and that is worth so much. History may be lost but living in the moment with this community is worth more. Adobe CF site should promote this community. I bet you new CFers or curious devs don't find this community fast enough.

Daniel, I'm not arguing it has no value. I WILL argue that this is not the only place cf people congregate. Besides the aforementioned ACF and Lucee (and Ortus) communities--each of which are and have long been very active--there is also the Facebook CF programmers group and the Adobe CF portal (which has both discussions and blog post, and it too is web searchable). We have no lack of community resources--whether one favors ACF or Lucee or both. We have instead, as you note, a failure of people to FIND them (even with Adobe promoting theirs and occasionally mentioning others, and though I and others do much to point folks to them all whenever possible). In fact, this really makes my point here: if the content from this slack community WERE web-searchable (via search engines), then that should INCREASE the chances of people finding the community and content here, which was again one of the points I made in my initial post. I'm really not being either a hater or a luddite. I'm sincerely trying to see the wealth be spread more widely.

Absolutely Charlie. I agree on that. And not too long ago I learned about facebook cf via slack. Recently I hired a jr dev with no cfml experience and he told me that the 2 weeks before he started with me he tried to learn CF. His opinions: SO and adobe forums were dated and didn't have easy to find beginner material, youtube suggested other coldfusion non programming technology and that he didn't like the installer. That was only during 2 weeks all on his own with a secured job on its way. Then once he started I built a tailored training plan for him. But I imagine curious devs looking into CFML will NOT give CFML a real chance. So it must be that making slack content searchable is only for people that already have a CF job.

Daniel, while I lament and sympathize, as you showed them it's not that there AREN'T good resources for getting started. Finding them is a challenge, as can happen with other tech. And all the more so with CF given its age--such that Google and SO tend to favor showing results that have been favored over the years, even if now dated. And while there is new content (from Adobe and others), it's hard to get much in the way of new content in frequently sought places--whether because everyone incorrectly assumes "no one is coming to cf anew" (as your story disproves), or because those who could contribute are discouraged (such as for the reason Sean shared about SO). We can all do what we can to help. Many do it here. Others do it elsewhere. There's not the desert some would assert. More just that "there's a lot of country" and things are rather spread out--and nit everyone is traveling the same roads to get to their cf destination. To a large degree, it is what it is. (I've had my cf411.com site for 20 years, updating it weekly and mentioning it often--but virtually no one else ever does. We can lead a horse to water..but we can't make it tell others how to find it.) All that said, I didn't understand your final conclusion. I don't see how this idea (of making the cfml slack content web accessible) would only help those already with a cf job?

I'm on the fence on this one. I've always found Slack more of a "communicate/socialize with other devs" tool. I do admit that a lot of devs solve a particular problem they're having and that could be beneficial to other devs but if I had to put a percentage on it, I'd say under 50% of the content does that. The rest is more social talk, jokes and every now and then a few public disagreements (speaking from experience). When it comes to a "community" portal, I like the fact that it's closed to the outside world but also that anyone can join. And Charlie mentioned Ortus which is also a great example. They've got a channel here, their own Slack and a community portal. I've rarely used the community portal because it's public and sometimes I just don't feel my question is fit for the general public.

David, as always, different folks use (and see) things differently than others. Nearly all the content I ever see here us folks sharing knowledge, asking and answering questions, with few being purely social. And if anything, such purely social discussions can (and in some cases do) have their own channel...and it could be made that such social channels would NOT be made publicly viewable/searchable. There's no question that the real appeal to some about Slack is that it is a cross between forums and chat...and it's "somewhere they may already be" for their work (but that's not true for everyone). For sure, some will always prefer to ask and answer questions here. And others will prefer to ask and answer questions in forums. And I suspect that over time, such web-searchability will become far more common in community Slack channels--whether provided by a third party like linen.dev or via slack itself. And also over time all stakeholders will have their chance to air out/iron out concerns so that in the end those wanting protection are served just as well as those wanting to see the sharing of knowledge made to be more open. I pointed to the pulumi blog post as an example of how one community was making the transition now, for us to consider. As I've also said already, I do realize the devil is in the details. 🙂

Thanks for raising the idea, Charlie. I like the idea of making most of the channels and their content here findable in hopes that they might be of value to people looking for assistance and the secondary benefit of broadening the group here if what they find is helpful. And you answered one question I had not yet asked: the primary “social” channel that (generally) would be less useful in that searching context would probably be #water-cooler and the ability to exclude it seems like a good thing from the standpoint of someone looking for CFML help likely doesn’t care (at first) about some of our banter there.

Hey Charlie, just to be clear that I'm not against the idea because I agree we need the problem/resolution posted somewhere searchable. I guess what I'd like to avoid is always having to read through 30-45 replies before I get to the solution. I also realize however that no bot can ever do that. I guess it would be great to have a functionality where we could tag the opening of a discussion "The Problem" and, like in other sites, tag the solution as the "Accepted Solution" and only have that published. But again, that still needs audience participation.

If I might add my own thoughts here, more and more I am being pressured to spend more time outside this Slack community, for many of the reasons Charlie stated. The ephemeral nature of discussions, the lack of good search, the lack of tie-in to SEO driven surfacing of issue/solutions. I push back with the argument that I've managed to help quite a number of customers with getting connected to answers, but as my schedule begins to fill, I find myself less able to just come in and "cruise" for folks with issues (many thanks of course to the users here which tag me in issues which may be of interest to me, it helps tons with efficiency). All that said, if this Slack was more exposed, it could help provide visible metrics and value to the folks that guide my focus as an evangelist.

@Mark Takata (Adobe) That sounds to me like we may need to have @Adam Cameron spend some time “recalibrating” the “folks that guide [your] focus”.

Well, he can try, but that might end up recalibrating my focus to another company lmao. The secret with my boss's boss and his boss is numbers. Metrics. They are all hyper fixated on charts and math. Tough work when my entire job is "try to make the community feel better and help folks out" but its what I signed up for. When y'all show up at CFSummit, if you see an exec, just let'em know you like me, you really like me. That will help lol.

@carehart that's what I've said in https://dev.lucee.org/t/how-to-reliably-check-if-the-jsessionid-cookie-was-set-in-the-client-browser/9931/3?u=andreas

@rstewart you have invoked Me. What are your bullying requirements today?

Yes, he could use some “assistance” with the “calibration” of his “supervisors”.

I'm with Charlie on this though. I raised the very same point a coupla months ago. That said... the signal to noise ratio here is... well... let's just say I don't think the broader world is really missing that much.

I think sometimes it might be hard for us to know what portion of this really might be “signal”, though. The thread this morning with Ray Camden on the confusion between Java and ColdFusion objects is one of those twisted ankles most of us have encountered at least once and having that stuff findable could help someone. The old saw about “One man’s trash…“?

When I ask questions here, the SN ratio in the responses is actually pretty good. Though others may consider 99% of my posts N... Plus, there's a smidgeon of occasional SO-verboten fun.

yeah, good point. And the Ray one is a good case in point in that we've been round the houses with that perhaps once every three months since I rejoined this gig a year ago. If it was written down somewhere else, ppl might think to google...?

It's a bit circular, this "where to post where to look" thing. For JS, CSS etc, SO can be decent, though sometimes the accepted answers make my teeth itch. It's less good for CF, but if people post here instead, that won't improve, round and round. SO is searchable, but it's also a really big pond, if you can't find a search-friendly formulation of your issue, good luck. I also ask "how would you approach this" questions here, which SO for some reason thinks shouldn't exist.

FYI, I have scheduled a meeting with the CEO of Linen next Monday and have introduced myself as co-owner of this Slack and sent him a list of questions that will need to be answered. I'll report back here next week.

Excellent. Thx, Sean.

Another option is creating our own bot. A bot whose sole purpose is to publish messages only marked for publishing. This could work by simply mentioning the bot and include a specific command string in the message like !answer, !altanswer, !suggestion, !tip, or !resource and the bot grabs the first message in the thread as the "question" and the message with the command string. Then we publish the content to our open source headless cms, and our open source website reads content from that headless cms. So who wants to host the bot app, database and seo-friendly website?

That concluding call to action seems premature. How about we first see how things go with Sean's meeting with the linen folks? :-) And/or, see what folks thing of your idea? Or see if anyone wants to build the bot before trying to find a place to host it? :-)

@Daniel Mejia You might also want to read Slack's Terms of Service in detail and make sure you wouldn't be violating their rules by doing that...

@seancorfield that's a great question for Linen.dev, please ask them for me. If they have a legal team I would trust their findings over mine.

Trust me, compliance with Slack's ToS is high on my list of questions for their CEO, along with GDPR and CPRA compliance issues.

Btw, Daniel, I thought your bot/commands idea could be an interesting suggestion for Sean to perhaps mention to the linen folks. I just thought stepping to building it ourselves was premature. If they don't like the idea or especially if things don't work out, then it would seem something worth considering ourselves--subject to those TOS and other concerns. Again though, our situation is not unique. Others would seemingly want a solution to this problem for public knowledge-sharing slack communities. We may see other solutions arise, including from Slack themselves.

People have written such bots. They're out there. They're open source. The sticking point is always who pays for hosting the bot process and who pays for hosting all that harvested content and how does the community assure longevity of such hosting. Usually the people making the "noise" about this don't have a good answer to that practical aspect.

Fair enough. This was why seeing linen (and its use in other communities) seemed worth at least exploring, as they were taking on the work and concerns. Of course, with any free service there's nearly always a gotcha, where WE become the product. Then again, slack itself is free, as are other things where people have ceded those concerns for the value proposition. Again, the devil is always in the details. And sometimes we can be frozen into status quo over fear of unknowns.

The 23,000-member Slack that I co-own has had teams of volunteers looking into this sort of stuff and spent probably hundreds of person-hours on analysis of other possible systems. As have many other large community Slacks. Frankly, the cost of running this as a Pro service would be small change to Adobe but they're not likely to do that when they already have their own corporate community systems.

Would the pro plan make the content web accessible? Web searchable? Sincere question. I've not studied this at all. And sure, I realized that there were pros and cons in a service such as linen. I really put it out for vetting by whatever powers that be and those with an interest in things here. :-)

23,000 members is cfml slack?

Good grief, no! Hahaha... The CFML Slack has just under 4,000 members.

which other slack do you co-own?

Clojurians. Which has just over 1,000 active members at the moment. And is on a sponsored Pro plan, courtesy of Slack itself.

Icymi Sean, I'd asked at https://cfml.slack.com/archives/C06T99N9G/p1651624560710709?thread_ts=1651528808.384909&cid=C06T99N9G

@carehart No, the Pro plan just removes the arbitrary 10,000 message limit Slack imposes on history and searching inside Slack. Well, it adds more "features", some of which provide better control for moderators, but they're mostly focused on corporate information systems (as a company) so that's what they target with Pro and above.

Strong +1 on making this content as web searchable as possible. As someone with limited CF / tech skills (but a lot of business responsibility), I find myself needing to ask easy questions that could likely be answered by me or others searching earlier posts. The CF gods here have been extremely generous with their time (thanks again!!!) but it would be great to be able to more easily do the research on my own before requesting assistance here.

Amen, @nickg :-)