@Mel @AlastairP
I have strong objections against closing the Slack forum!
For years I have been communicating with contacts and customers to set up my business around designing and building WikiHouses.
So I have even current customers that I have a message history with that is needed to fulfil the pending jobs.
I also look up posts that I have written there in the past to current questions that come on the new forum.
As far as I have researched it, it is basically not possible to back up from Slack.
So can an other solution be found than to close the forum and delete all message history?
(Luckily Slack has changed its policy, and gave back the message history to everyone. At least I assume everyone got this back?)
(they probably didn’t like that their platform was getting abandoned massively by their stoic policy changes)
@melhof sorry for the delay in getting back to you, I have been on leave. Looking into this today and will be in touch!
Hey @melhof - ok, so I have looked into this properly now…first, thanks for pointing out Slack has gone back on its decision to block older content - we had received no notification from Slack (and in fact, they haven’t announced anything on their website either) so were very surprised to now be able to see all the content reappear. As you will know, we have now moved almost all community members over here to Discourse and no new members have been able to join Slack for many months. However, I appreciate your point about using the platform/its content as a resource and messaging service and I am glad you have found it useful over the years. When we chose to move over to Discourse we did so because it allowed us to have a more open platform, and this is working very well so far. We do not want to have to maintain 2 platforms, thus the decision to close the Slack community permanently.
As platform admins, we are not able (or in fact, legally allowed) to backup any members messages, but simply all the content from the channels, which I did last year. Unfortunately, making this content available publicly could have data protection implications, as all content is linked to members names and photos - these are members who have clearly consented at the time to display their names/photos in the Slack community but have no way of consenting for this information to be made publicly available elsewhere, so we can’t do much with that I’m afraid.
Also, just to point out that there’s always the possibility that Slack might reverse their decision again. So I would urge you to download all the information you need from your private messages. If you need more time, we are happy to extend the closing date to 1 July (I’ll put up a general message about this), but after that the Slack channel will be closed. Please get back to me if you have any other questions!
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