while we're on the subject, I'd like to see some discussion around who should have access to the raw log data. These are text files, one for each day, which contain all the raw events we receive from slack, one json object per line

currently they're in a private repo, and a handful of people who asked for it have gotten access in the past

on the one hand I'm wondering if this can be public, it would make e.g. collaborating on this app easier

Given that anyone can sign up for Clojurians and nearly all the channels are public, do the raw events need to be private at all?

on the other hand I think there are privacy concerns, not everyone is aware they are being logged. The main scenario I can imagine is that an abuser pulls out the full log of a person's messages to find either identifying or incriminating information.

Yes, good points.

it's maybe a bit of a stretch, given that they could also scrape this off the site, and people should assume what they post here is more or less public anyway, but still I felt this should be talked about

I guess my yardstick for this would be: are the IRC logs Google/Bing searchable publicly?

the logs are definitely searchable and indexed, that's part of the reason we have them. Getting the raw data just makes it a bit easier to pull out the bits you're interested in...

is there any precedent to chat communities adopting a license for stuff that's posted on them?

might be impossible to apply it retroactively, and probably equally impossible to agree on a specific license 🙂 but it would take away the ambiguity of who "owns" this data

another point to consider: if someone would ask to remove their message from the history then I think we should honor that. This hasn't happened yet, although there are a few channels that we've been explicitly asked not to log. I've also been approached once by someone who changed their avatar but was still seeing the old one in the logs.

if it's a public git repo then it might be impossible (or at least not very useful) to delete stuff from it

I think I'll start a thread on Clojureverse about this, this might warrant some long form async conversation 🙂

It's very hard to satisfy every concern but you're right to want to err on the conservative side -- despite my comments about "everything" being searchable via Google/Bing...

Ok, I'll keep it private until further notice, but I might make a small amount of it public (maybe a week worth of logs), so that there's some test data for people who want to help with the app

Somewhat related to this, one thing that would be very useful to me would be for me to be able to log privately the messages from my DMs, since I use them a lot for support. Is this possible with something like logbot? Can I run my own bot just for my own DMs? This is more of a technical question, there are also obviously issues around notifying others that I’m doing so etc.

A combination of something like that and something like http://slackarchive.io would make Slack work fine for me.

@plexus Do you have an opinion on replacing the current logbot with http://slackarchive.io? The main advantage is no maintenance (code or sysadmin), the main disadvantage is that it might go away any time I guess.

@cfleming so I use the IRC gateway for this. I run an irssi instance which just connects to slack, and provides passive log collection for all my dms and channels here.

It works pretty well. Slack only exposes dms to administrators/auditors IIRC, so bots that aren't authed as you can't see your dms anyway.

The logs are less structured than I'd like but that could be fixed with a different client and or some engineering time.

@arrdem That’s interesting, thanks. I’ll try that out next week.

Who would have thought that IRC would end up saving Slack for me 🙂

I've really been liking wee-slack as my slack client recently. It uses weechat.

It supports fancy things like threads though, which is cool.