Yes, that's exactly the point. You owned this data, you could do whatever you wanted with it, and it was stored in a format that was both trivial and most fitting for the data stored.
> Hell, you couldn't open them with your IRC client.
I'm pretty sure you could in some clients, and some definitely pulled stored logs to backfill the chat after restart. Though I haven't done that myself (instead I relied on a bouncer to supply the backlog on connection).
> There's no reason you can't just ctrl-C a bunch of stuff out of a Slack chat and ctrl-V it into your text editor. Only difference between that and IRC logging is that you have to do it manually.
That's a world of a difference. In Slack, it's painful to do, and if you haven't done it when you first saw a message, it's going to be even more painful to do after the fact.
Of course they are! Using anything other than text files to store chat logs would be idiotic. The main point is that slack is a user-hostile application that does not even allow you to do that. Why people put up with this is beyond me.
Right, my point is why doesn't Slack do that? Then you could use `grep` or `find` to search across all your messages and avoid paying a monthly fee to access your entire message history and...oh, right.
I'm not particularly keen on Slack but suggesting search would be better locally is plain silly. Search is obviously better done at the server.
That ignores the possibility of the data being synced between local system and the server. Slack is already in the cloud, so cloud options are on the table. And so is syncing data.
> suggesting search would be better locally is plain silly. Search is obviously better done at the server.
The reverse is obvious to me. Slack search, like all web SaaS search tools, is really bad. I could do better with grep - and it would work faster, and I could actually trust that it searches through all the messages, instead of giving me some eventually-consistent view into results of a query that is only tangentially related to what I requested. And they wouldn't be able to tell me which properties I can or can not search by.
And I'm not talking theory - in the past, I did some spelunking in many years' worth of IRC logs in a folder on my drive, and the experience was much better than searching for anything in Slack.
Sure, most clients let you automatically save logs, but they were just text files you opened in any text editor. They weren't in a special IRC format, and you didn't open them with your IRC client. Hell, you couldn't open them with your IRC client. There's no reason you can't just ctrl-C a bunch of stuff out of a Slack chat and ctrl-V it into your text editor. Only difference between that and IRC logging is that you have to do it manually.