Gavin-John Noonan created the Slack workspace https://clojurians.slack.com on March 1, 2015. By the beginning of 2017 (and perhaps earlier), it was already the most popular on-line chat location for topics related to Clojure development (chart and data linked below if you are curious).
This Slack community was created via a free plan provided by Slack for open source communities. The advantage is that Slack pays for all of the resources. A disadvantage is that the free service limits the searchable message history to the most recent 10,000 messages, total across all channels.
Browse clojurians-log: https://clojurians-log.clojureverse.org
For several channels, the earliest messages recorded in clojurians-log go back to 2015. Others start later, e.g. because the channel was created later, and/or no one started logging the channel on clojurians-log until later. There are likely some 'gaps' in the middle where messages were not being logged.
On Google, you can limit searches to any web site by appending
site:site-url to the end of the search, e.g. to search for
occurrences of defmacro only on the Clojurians log site, use the
Google search:
defmacro site:clojurians-log.clojureverse.org
The mirroring of many Clojurians Slack channels began on Clojurians Zulip Chat near the beginning of 2019.
The archive can be found in the #slack-archive stream. For every mirrored Slack channel there's a separate topic. Very likely most of your search results will appear in one of those.
To search it (using the browser):
- go to the #slack-archive stream
- type
/(or click the magnifying class in the top right) - append the search terms or string to the query,
e.g.
stream:slack-archive "cannot be cast to class"- link to results for this example search:
stream:slack-archive "cannot be cast to class"
- link to results for this example search:
You'll see that it yields results from several topics (i.e. Slack
channels) under the slack-archive stream.
To see the original conversation that any of the found messages appeared in, do the following:
- Select the message (a thick border will appear around it).
- Click the topic (e.g.
slack-archive > beginners). - Use the back-button to return to the search results.
Note: As of 2021-Jan-07, the steps above sometimes get you to the message in the context of its conversation, but sometimes you end up at a completely different message in the topic. This might be a bug in Zulip. Below is an alternate method that may work more often:
- Select the message (a thick border will appear around it).
- When your cursor is anywhere over a message, look in the top right of that message. A little bit to the left of the message sent time is an icon of three dots stacked vertically. Clicking that icon pops up a menu. Select the item "Copy link to conversation". Paste this link somewhere useful, e.g. a new browser window or tab.
To search within a specific Slack channel, add topic: with the
corresponding name of the channel to the query, e.g.
stream:slack-archive topic:beginners "cannot be cast to class"- link to results for this example search:
stream:slack-archive topic:beginners "cannot be cast to class".
As Clojurians Zulip has its own streams where people discuss Clojure (i.e. ones that are not copies of messages that were sent to Clojurians Slack), you can also search across all public streams:
streams:public "cannot be cast to class"(note "streams:" not "stream:" here)- link to results for this example search:
streams:public "cannot be cast to class".
Zulip's help page on advanced search is a good place to read about more features: https://clojurians.zulipchat.com/help/search-for-messages
Logging of messages on Clojurians Slack is enabled on a per-Slack-channel basis, not globally.
First, join the Clojurians Slack channel yourself. Then send one or more of these messages to the channel:
- For Clojurians log:
/invite @logbot - For logging to Clojurians ZulipChat:
/invite @zulip-mirror-bot
If someone has already successfully invited one of these bots before,
you should see a response like @logbot is already in this channel,
and no other human member will see any activity on the channel.
If yours is the first attempt to add one of these bots, then everyone
on the channel including you should see a message like logbot [APP] was added to #channel-name.
Yes, someone could choose to pay for this. If someone chose to do this, they would be legally responsible to pay the bill to Slack for all users of Clojurians Slack. The current pricing as of Jan 2021 puts the bill at somewhere near USD $7,600 per month (with a 50% discount for the first 3 months). This amount could change later based upon Slack's pricing model, but it could also go up or down as the number of active users of Clojurians Slack changes. Slack does not provide a way to bill every user of Clojurians Slack separately for an equal fraction of that amount.
2021-Jan-06 snapshot of Clojurians Slack price estimate
calculation: $8 USD x 952 members x 1 month = $7,616 USD, billed
monthly.
Given this price, it is perhaps quite understandable that no one has volunteered to take on such a financial obligation themselves.
Several people have asked whether Slack offers an option where:
- Individual users could pay a few dollars per month so that they had access to unlimited search history on Clojurians.slack.com, but
- everyone else who used it for free would continue to have the current limited search history.
As of 2020, Slack does not offer such an option, and they expressed no interest in doing so.
First, there are many dimensions and aspects to "better", not a single 0 to 10 ranking that captures all judgements of a service that all people value equally. Slack has many good qualities.
There are already on-line communities on other services created for discussing Clojure, e.g. on IRC, Discord, ZulipChat, and several others. As of 2021, none of them have reached the popularity that Slack has.
- Discord: https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/6c4z91/a_discord_for_clojurians/
- Zulip: https://clojureverse.org/t/ann-searchable-slack-archive/3777
- IRC and some others listed here: https://clojure.org/community/resources
Why doesn't everyone just switch to some other service?
Every individual chooses which of these services they want to use. They are not limited to one, but few people want to participate in 10 of them simultaneously. Even if someone is aware of all of them, they are likely to choose one, or perhaps two or three, that they find to give them a good UI experience, and more importantly, where others respond to their questions. So far, Slack has been the most popular place for Clojure developers. Yes, there is a network effect here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
Could the current situation ever change? Of course it could. But there is no "Clojure dictator for on-line chat" that can make all of these individuals use a different service. Think like a politician in a free society, or a sales person, not like a monarch issuing decrees, and you might find a way to persuade many people to switch services. Keep this in mind: merely because you think service X is clearly superior to Slack, that fact alone is unlikely to convince people to join service X and stop using Slack. It is still unlikely, even if you have a well written article detailing all the ways that X is better than Slack. Even if you find many people who agree with your article.
IRC was the most popular on-line chat forum for Clojure for several years, and then the majority of people gradually changed their primary choice to Slack. No one forced everyone to switch, and IRC is still used by a few people for discussing Clojure.
The Clojurians Slack channel #community-development is the most appropriate place on Slack to discuss this. It has been discussed several times per year for several years, so please realize that it is not trivial to come up with a novel idea in this area.
The State of Clojure Survey has had a little over 2,000 responders (i.e. people who choose to fill out the questionnaire) from 2016 through 2020. The results for all questions can be found here: https://clojure.org/news/2020/02/20/state-of-clojure-2020
The chart below shows the percentage of people who responded to the question "My involvement in the Clojure ecosystem includes". The first survey year shown is 2017, since the results were published in Jan 2017, but it is from the State of Clojure 2016 survey results, probably called that since the questionnaire was sent out and responded to late in 2016.
