Investigate moving chat/support to slack

[castrojo]

Someone mentioned today how they wish they could engage with the dev team more but they can't really use gitter so I asked in a straw poll in the community meeting "Hey if we used Slack would you use it?" and then an got overwhelmingly positive response. I'm filing this so we can cast a wider net for feedback. Not many of our users are on the CNCF slack and the finops slack is by application only, so let's discuss:

Things we'd need to sort:

• An inviter so that we can run the slack in a more open manner
• A method for capturing our history.
  • Given our attempts to search over our archives we should prioritize UX here, we'll need full text search with all the goodies.
• Discussion on bots, etc.
  • One of the nice benefits of running our own would be we can control the bots we use, think PR review channels, github integrations, etc.
  • Nicer integration of announcements, etc.
• We'd get nicer metrics that we can put in our transparency reports showing user growth, etc.

And it'd be nice to be able to have split channels when we get there, like for example right now we just have the one gitter channel, we could have a -dev one that is more usable during day-to-day reviews, that sort of thing.

Working Checklist of things we want:

• dedicated channel for github bot with the activity stream of the project
• Archives
• Inviter page
• Least privilege lock down in general (aka so people can't make their own channels, etc) (Make sure @here, @channel and @everyone are disabled)
• Auto announce c7n releases in slack
• Community meeting announce in #general - this is probably a gcal plugin, it'd be nice if we could just announce on the spot and people can join on tuesdays.

[kapilt]

thanks for filing the issue. While I've had my misgivings about using slack for open source over the years (history held hostage, closed source, etc), the growth of the finops custodian slack (2x people over our official gitter channel) and the fairly ubiquitous usage (minus orgs using ms teams) has me convinced that we should open it up as additional channel, not a replacement for gitter, although happy to reconsider that at a later date based on usage. There are still orgs that block slack out right, but the convenience factor on it is high for many.

re archiver

• https://github.com/felixrieseberg/slack-archive
• https://github.com/docmarionum1/slack-archive-bot

re inviter

• k8s seems to use https://github.com/rauchg/slackin but that appears to be dead
• timescale seems to be using some native capability within slack
  https://timescaledb.slack.com/join/shared_invite/zt-1cgw0xuae-i_FOMvse78ttN7ldFEHZoA#/shared-invite/email

we have a custodian slack we setup a few years ago already extant,
https://cloud-custodian.slack.com

direct signup link
https://join.slack.com/t/cloud-custodian/shared_invite/zt-1egv7w2jo-CI5HM3Y6uccLcwtWYeW9hw

[marcoceppi]

re inviter

• k8s seems to use https://github.com/rauchg/slackin but that appears to be dead

This is being replaced, as an fyi: kubernetes-retired/funding#33 because it is unmaintained

[castrojo]

• k8s is looking at: https://communityinviter.com/ for the inviter, that's $5 a month (or ads).
• https://saveslack.com/ will take exports and render sites out of them with mkdocs with like a nice search box and stuff, but it appears to only do one offs - the site mentions upcoming hosting plans, self hosting options, etc.

[castrojo]

Just a quick update, the inviter is working, here's the URL: https://communityinviter.com/apps/cloud-custodian/c7n-chat and people are joining as I've sent out invites over the usual comms channels. That just leaves the archiver as the last major thing we need.

[marcoceppi]

I've started looking at how to do an archiver. What I've come down to is a bot that runs on a regular cadence (probably 24 hours, maybe more maybe less) which will export all the chats and convert them to markdown push them to a git repo and publish a static site. I'm going to try to get a proof of concept for this export to markdown then check back in on what we should do about availability for the archives (will the site that hosts them be public?) and location

[kapilt]

@marcoceppi what about extant archiving tools? Ideally we’d retain json as raw, and render for publishing archive. Yes re public archive site for public channels.

[castrojo]

Just adding a working note here:

When people get help on the slack they'll leave a link in their discussion: https://github.com/orgs/cloud-custodian/discussions/7863

For now just updating those isn't a problem but long term maybe there's a bot or something we could do to auto translate slack archive links to where we'd keep the long term archive and just have a thing post an updated URL.