Hello everyone,
Thanks to prompting from Sumit, I have "resurrected" a project I
started back in 2019, and have got searchable slack archives available:
<https://apache-airflow.slack-archives.org/>
(This is a fancy looking URL, there is nothing else on the domain yet.
Any other projects want this too?)
A little known fact of Slack is that the export an admin can do
contains /all/ messages, not just the ones the client will show, so
this has all 130k+ messages in the DB. For example
<https://apache-airflow.slack-archives.org/announcements/page-1> for
example shows the very first message from Fokko
This service also has a bot user, called Archie the Archive Bot, that
if invited to channels will listen for messages (and deletions/edits
etc). To get this bot in the channel we need to run /invite @archie --
I'm not sure if only workspace admins can do this or if anyone can.
Features that are missing/broken/confusing right now:
- Thread replies aren't handled visually correctly -- rather than being
nested under the original message they are just shown like a normal
message.
- No ability to permalink to a specific message
- Markdown formatting in messages might be incomplete
- Shared files/images may or may not be accessible. I haven't really
tested it.
- It needs a privacy policy/data protection statement
- Since it's using VueJS (the project I forked this froms choice, not
mine) it's probably not indexable by search engines.
- The front end is only showing 10k messages per channel
(<https://apache-airflow.slack-archives.org/random/page-1>) -- given
it's paged already there's no need for this limitation to exist.
- Links to users don't go anywhere sensible.
I'm sure there are many more small gotchas, but I didn't want perfect
to be the enemy of the good.
The code for this service lives at
<https://github.com/ashb/slackarchive> - PRs welcome ;) Most of the
readme is still wrong there.
If anyone isn't happy with this I can delete it, or set certain
channels to not be archived etc.
-ash
