I’m aware of many companies who have moved to a 90 day message retention policy in Slack. I thought it was a cost saving measure. But I’m beginning to see the wisdom in it.

They way things are going, 90 days is too long.

Without infinite retention, our company would lose untold searchable solutions to problems and other vital information.

It’s a deep hole for a company to dig itself out of, not to mention changing the habits of people to explicitly document things elsewhere.

It would be neat if Slack reported stats on searches so that, for example, a company could better understand what key conversations should be moved into proper documents…but this is likely against Slack’s interests.

Sorry to be Captain Obvious but the solution for that is to update the official, permanently stored reference docs when a question is asked on slack, not keep the only source of tribal knowledge on a ephemeral chat app.

IMO Slack and chat apps are way overused in development teams. They’re there for questions like “when are we meeting for that team event tonight?” And “Hey, can you review this code before I submit?” And NOT “Can you describe, in massive detail, all the arguments that get passed to our FooBar function?”