Are our Slack versions different? I use both desktop and browser depending on what machine I'm on at the time, and searching for text snippets or just keywords brings up a side panel with search results and messages in context of when they happened, along with a link that will let me scroll if I chose to the moment in time it happened.

The UX you describe is one I haven't seen in Slack since very early releases.

Yeah, that's my problem. The tiny sidebar is not a great UX. The core problem, I think, is the lack of real threading options. Conversations never really start or end in a chat room, so even if you find the keyword you are looking for, find the start and end of that conversation is very difficult. Mainly because it's usually interspersed with tons of other chats in the channel. I guess you could make tons of channels, but that that bogs you down in having to check them all for stuff you actually care about. :/

I'm sorry if this sounds snarky but a lot of your criticisms of slack so far just don't seem rooted in anything resembling the recency of development within the platform.

https://slackhq.com/threaded-messaging-comes-to-slack-417ffb...

Threaded conversations have been supported for a full year now, you have the ability to specify and narrow your searches down to specific rooms by using "in:#general" or by conversation by using "in:@dave", but a plain search will search as best the application can public rooms, private rooms and private messages, and the application does a great job I think telling you exactly where the search results come from, when they happened along with a contextual view of the conversation that happened before and after the search results-giving you the precise context of what was talked about, and allow you to both jump back in time to the moment the keyword appears, and jump back to "Now" very easily.

https://slackhq.com/next-level-searching-in-slack-1ce56aa8ad...

Again, sorry if this sounds snarky, but I don't think your critiques are really lined up with how Slack has been developed in the last year. Many of your problems have been directly solved.

Nobody uses threads, look at any public slack. They are too difficult and unfriendly to use. The entire idea of a "thread" is broken in the slack ecosystem if you can just post in the channel without starting a new one. It makes no sense.

The fact at that slack has to blog about how to search proves my point, IMO. Gmail doesn't need a post about that. I'm talking about context, which is where search fails, because threads don't work. I can find keywords in slack just fine (which is all the blog post talks about, really). I can't find and save an entire conversation about something important.

:/ I've tried slack and all the shortcuts. It fails as a business tool. Simple email and chatting produces more productivity.

> I've been using slack for my jobs for years, and it wastes more time than saves. No real work gets done in a chat room, which is what slack is.

Speak for yourself. Our DevOps uses it extensively, and gets plenty of work done. It's been a great tool, has saved time, decreased ticket response time, and increased follow up. If we didn't have it, we would have to scramble to find something to replace it.

The only thing Slack provided for the longest time was chat. Essentially it was nothing more than a decent, private IRC implementation. I'm curious what your DevOps team found as a pain point in communication. Were you just using email?

Slack now is a significantly improved tool that we use all the time for everything except large or external video chatting. It's a very nice tool for centralization of alerting, monitoring, etc. We'd find it very hard to move elsewhere as a company.

We started using it when the API was already available, and tied in error alerts from our integration server on day one. We've added a lot more since then, among them jenkins, monitoring thresholds on our AWS instances, etc.

Yeah, we're in a similar boat using it to monitor Jenkins, Datadog, Zendesk, JIRA, and a whole slew of other things aside from chat. It's hard to find a better bang for your buck if your company is bought into the ecosystem.

Are there any better (modern) alternatives?

matrix.org , hopefully

twist app, maybe

I've heard/seen good things.

Searching is pretty nice in slack, sounds like you haven't used it much?

Results crammed into the right corner, with tiny snippets of useless information aren't useful for me. :/