As I mentioned, in our community we have some deal with Slack so that we are paid (up to a point) and have full message history retention. Search can also go through all of those messages too. This is extremely valuable, and is a selling point for Slack if you can somehow get on to a paid plan without breaking the bank.

But in my experience, many don't use the search anyhow. :P

I'll admit, I don't know the full details of the relationship we have with Slack as I'm just an admin and not an owner. It is paid for by someone, but I don't know how much we're paying per head or of it's a flat rate.

If people aren't using search, then message history retention isn't that important for you it seems. I would suggest that maybe your people are using email in situations where they'd like more permanence.

This is common, and Slack is treated more like a hallway conversation. Hallway conversations are enormously valuable, but if you want a record of something or if you want to make sure it reaches everyone, you use email instead.

It is to me personally, as I use it to find answers to questions I don't know the answer to. At a minimum, I can point them to someone who had a similar problem in case they solved it.

Yeah I feel the same as you. So much knowledge gets shared on Slack that searching the complete history is often really valuable.

I even went a step further and built a product that would generate FAQs from slack history and made it easy for people to add and categorize knowledge from Slack to provide answers to questions, metric, etc...

I would love to have open source communities use it for free if helped them manage supporting their communities easier.

It's https://landria.io. Would love to know if it would be useful for you.

I thought IRC didn’t have message history either? I’m not saying Slack is good for open-source communities, but it seems like “not having history” would be the status quo.

IRC doesn’t have its own message history but most servers publish archives. You’d still need your client to load up archives for when you were offline if you wanted to see missed messages online. Otherwise you would have to look at the archive separately.