In response to requests here about enabling a publicly searchable archive of conversations, and the specific suggestion by @carehart to look at linen.dev, I met with their SEO and talked about how their system worked and how/why they would support free Slack communities like ours. The Admins discussed the pros and cons of connecting up a publicly searchable archive, privacy issues, sensitive data, and so on, and decided that it was probably worth at least moving forward with a trial. Accordingly, https://cfml.linen.dev/ now exists as a publicly browsable/searchable archive of all public channel discussions here moving forward. ALL public channel conversations from this point on -- and going back to the current limit of search history here (about 1 month) -- will be web searchable so bear that in mind when posting things here that you might not want the whole world to see! If you post something here and have second thoughts, you can delete your message here and the deletion should affect the Linen archive (there's a caching window of maybe 5-15 minutes where deletions will be honored). Linen works best when you use threads in Slack -- which we already encourage anyway. I'll post more details in a 🧵

Wow on that. Thanks, Sean. I do realize there may be some initial consternation, but I really hope that ultimately it will better serve the wider CFML community to be able to ultimately have Google surface the great knowledge shared here. I guess we wait now to see if that happens...or did the Linen folks share any thoughts on whether we should expect that to be automatic? or whether they or we need to undertake any additional actions to facilitate/optimize that?

My impression is that Linen is a very early startup right now, with just a couple of devs, trying to get this product off the ground. The CEO was previously the guy behind https://papercups.io/ which is in maintenance mode now as he focuses on Linen instead. That means there's a risk that a public archive based on linen.dev could just go away -- but we'd be no worse off in that case.

BTW, if it may help anyone to read more about this topic, it started with a thread last week (with about 65 replies, mostly supportive of the idea) at https://cfml.slack.com/archives/C06T99N9G/p1651528808384909

A thread that is already publicly available: https://cfml.linen.dev/t/417996/topic

I can't tell if your last two messages were in reply to my first response here a few mins ago. I was referring there to the prospect of the content ending up being found and indexed by Google (among others)...and whether that was something Linen might have suggestions on, or actions yet to take.

I believe it will be organic, but I can ask Kam about that specific topic.

Looks great. Use threads ✅ No privacy ✅ Search cfml.linen.dev before posting ✅ Do my best to not leave unanswered questions ✅

Thanks, and when you do, the reason I ask is that I had looked at several of the other featured now-public slack communities on their site last week, and I waded back a couple of weeks and found some content and searched for it on Google (even with quotes) and got nothing. I then tried the site: and inurl: keywords for a couple, like

site:linen.dev inurl:/s/airbytehq

for https://www.linen.dev/s/airbytehq. but there was nothing at all.

When Kam demo'd it to me, he had a specific search phrase for which the Linen archive was the top result in Google so I'm sure there are a number factors at play. I'll report back with what he says about search engines.

Wonderful, thanks.

Hey guys, not for nothing but normally when you make a major privacy change like this you let people know and the change is effective from that day forward. I'm a private person. I doubt I'm the only one. Personally, I don't have a blog, I don't tweet my daily thoughts, publish on Facebook or any other public social media. I really value my privacy. I joined this group because it was a closed CF community group which is a great form of privacy. There are things I've said here that I wouldn't put in a public Google Group or anywhere else that is publicly accesible. That being said, now that you've made a "No Privacy" rule, I can accept that and will tailor my messages accordingly but I would definitely delete anything before the rule was changed. Let's compare this to working in an office with your colleagues. You get a lot of work done in meetings and yes, a lot of that conversation could help people in other areas and in other companies. But if you know your words will be broadcasted and searchable, you watch your words and your tone much more carefully. What you're saying now is that everything meeting you've had for the past few months is now public. IMHO, I don't think making this decision retroactive is a "majority decides" kind of thing.

@seancorfield Is there an option to have images posted here (e.g., screenshots) included in the Linen archive? The thread I started yesterday afternoon (https://cfml.slack.com/archives/C06TABBT8/p1652216425910499) on the #adobe channel, asking about one aspect of the recent updates, has a couple of screenshots that are not included in the public archive.

David (@David Belanger), if you read my original msg and the thread that followed, it's not that any of this failed to consider that concern. As I noted in raising it, I realized it was a thorny issue. And at the time I didn't even know who might be in a role of taking leadership on even the debate, let alone any implementation. So Sean stepped up, in that thread and now this one, indicating how they--he and this slack's admins--have indeed taken into consideration such concerns and opted to go forward. You know Sean doesn't do anything in a cavalier manner. He not only conveyed his having gone through this issue with another (far larger) Slack group he manages, but also with the folks behind linen--who surely would be hearing about it from every group who might join, especially the voices of those with such strong privacy concerns. It is a conundrum. You've posed one approach to address it, and others have proposed still more. Let's hear what Sean has to say. Again I'm sure he has given this plenty of thought. Being on the west coast, he may be a while longer of course.

@David Belanger People have been asking for publicly-searchable archives of this Slack for years because so much useful discussion here is lost, both to the free Slack plan's limited search history and to anyone outside this Slack. This Slack is "public" insofar as anyone can signup -- membership is not moderated (even though content and behavior are) -- and I think most people consider the lack of searchable history to be a bug, rather than a feature. Anyone who signs up can search the past three months (roughly) of content, within Slack's 10,000 message limit, and that's what is now available on cfml.linen.dev. When we enabled the Linen.dev sync, we had assumed that it would only take messages from that point forward, so finding out that it sync'd back three months was a bit of a surprise and definitely has pros and cons: we get more of the useful recent conversations archived for future CF devs to find but it has taken content that perhaps no one expected to become web-searchable. The CEO of Linen did not make that clear when this was discussed with him. As noted above tho', anyone can signup here and search all that content anyway if they want -- the signup process is automated and there's no way to know if folks are already creating accounts here, solely for the purpose of searching the history. If anyone wants their past message history expunged from Linen, I can ask them to do that -- but it is a somewhat manual process and any future messages from those people will still be archived. We've already had one person deactivate their account here and request that Slack delete their personal information (under the equivalent of GDPR/CPRA) but Slack does not delete your message history here so, again, that is something we Admins have to take up "manually" with Linen on a case-by-case basis. I will also point folks to Slack's Terms of Service, which are legally binding and which y'all agreed to by signing up and using the service: https://slack.com/terms-of-service/user -- in particular:

When an Authorized User (including, you) submits content or information to the Services, such as messages or files (“Customer Data”), you acknowledge and agree that the Customer Data is owned by Customer and the Contract provides Customer with many choices and control over that Customer Data.

The "Customer" is basically the Admin team here, of whom I am the primary contact (because Slack requires a designated authority).

So @seancorfield, just to go back to my previous example about a company, the board of directors (aka Slack admins) have decided that's it OK to take all previous closed meeting room conversations of their employees and make them public for the world to see. Again, when I signed up for my Google Groups I knew that because that's how it worked. I didn't sign up for that here. I'd be willing to bet it's really not hard at all to use May 11th (or a future date) as the cutoff to publish messages to Linen as all posts are time stamped. To be clear, I want the web searchability and I know it will be useful. But you have to respect the privacy of previous messages because Slack is a closed social network.

Legally, we don't "have to respect the privacy of previous messages" because, per the ToS, the Customer owns those messages. These are public channels, where anyone in the community can read them, and anyone can join the community. Private channels are private. DMs are private. Neither of those is being exposed. You did signup for this -- those are Slack's legally binding Terms of Service. That's why I posted that particular paragraph. If you're embarrassed by what you've posted here being more easily accessible than it already is, we can always ask Linen to manually delete all of your previous contributions to this community from their archives. Those messages will still be present in Slack for anyone in the world to signup and read, however.

I'm not talking legally Sean, I'm talking ethically. And let's be clear, Slack isn't making these messages public, you are through a third party service. I'm not embarrassed by my messages at all. But there is a world of context that the community understands and the generally public doesn't. Context is everything when it's a discussion. So, if you can't respect the fact that those messages were only for the CFML community members that actually signed up and had to login to see them then yes, please delete all my previous messages from Linen.

@rstewart The

@User

issue is a bug that should be fixed next week, apparently.

Thanks for following up on that, @seancorfield. Much appreciated.

@rstewart They confirmed that images/attachments are something they're working on (I see some do come across, others do not, so I assume this is "complicated").

Also good to know; thanks, Sean.