Slack & TShock

I started putting a large amount of time into TShock again. In the midst of attempting to solve the dilemma of whether or not we should use IRC or a site wide shoutbox, Guillermo Rauch of Socket.IO fame published a blog post called “Slackin,” detailing how Slack, the team messaging service, improved the Socket.IO community greatly within the first week of its introduction. Slack is not a service that offers open invitation URLs, so the more useful part of his post was the simple NodeJS app that he provides for delivering invitations to new users – effectively creating an open-signup Slack instance. I set up the invitation server a few days later, and at this time of writing, we have 36 members (and 4 bots) registered with Slack. Previously, IRC was dead as far as usage goes, and the shoutbox had, at maximum, around 20 posts a day.

Rather than type a detailed report about how Slack is a huge improvement, the numbers really speak for themselves. Slack has had a mind bogglingly large impact on the TShock community thusfar, even without the large majority of the userbase interacting with it. I can’t wait to see how it grows from here.