@qqq Yeah, it drives me nuts

I’m surprised at Slacks fast popularity given this limited history stuff

Ok, thanks to @seancorfield, we just installed the IRCCloud app here. This means that you can sign up with IRCCloud for $5/year, and get persistent logging of all your Slack content, including DMs.

See https://twitter.com/irccloud/status/971416931373854721

You need to be a paid IRCCloud user to enable this right now, since it’s still in their Labs

I thought it was $5/month not per year?

(I swear it was $5/month back when I had a paid account)

My apologies, you’re right - $5/month or $50/year if you pay annually.

Oh that is a nice thing, it is about time and loads of kudos if they are still a thing to IRCCloud folks!

but doesn’t that all go away when slack stops doing irc?

ah, the answer is no as they’re using the api

@alexmiller right. The only issue is that you can’t use a third-party IRC client with IRCCloud, only the web interface.

But even if I never actually log into it, I’ll just treat it as my Slack archiver and log in if I need to look at my history.

(Not criticizing the admins here. @seancorfield in particular has been amazing.) However, https://thenextweb.com/apps/2018/03/22/slacks-new-policy-lets-bosses-read-employees-dms-without-consent/ is insane. What is slack trying to do?

Interesting. In the past they took a firm stance on the opposite.

Larger companies insist on full access to email and chat transcripts to satisfy requests for discovery in the event of a legal proceeding. Products like the Google suite have explicit e-discovery features (IIRC Google calls theirs “Vault”) that archive emails and chats that match a predefined criteria, regardless if the employees have attempted to delete the messages. Other third party products exist for this too. Not at all surprising to me that Slack would add this feature.

Which doesn’t mean the employer will let “bosses” snoop on employees as a routine thing. I’ve never seen that happen. Only in legal discovery.

But that’s up to the company to establish as policy, not something Slack can control.

tl;dr that's not new, what is new is that the writers of the messages won't be notified.

This is a fascinating topic. Is it just a matter of who is paying? Like in unpaid plans the admins do this?

> But don’t assume that you’re safe if your organization uses a free or Standard plan; administrators can request access to the data export tool by providing Slack with either valid legal process, consent of team members, or a requirement or right under applicable laws.

I bet, in reality, you dont even have to be the admin. Meaning, that if there is a way, it can be done. which isn’t saying much.

Slack let's admins download all public content. Private content is not accessible on free or standard plans -- unless you can prove legal necessity (which is going to be exceedingly rare). I'm not surprised corporate Slack customers need this feature tho -- it's basic legal compliance.