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Discussion: SMF as a Slack alternative (theming)

Started by dakotaroar, August 22, 2019, 12:42:31 PM

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dakotaroar

Background: I've been using Slack for a few years now and have been looking for alternatives that do what I want. Having come from an online forum background (both as a user and admin), the lack of detailed moderation abilities such as moving posts among channels or among threads has been frustrating. Additionally, Slack and alternatives require either Linux servers (something not all workplaces have, if they live on Windows) or a more involved stack than PHP+MySQL. Being inside walled gardens like Slack means they control user permissions as well--if I want to invite someone to my workspace but limit them to one channel, I can't--unless I pay the monthly fee.

So the idea here is that SMF does all of these admin/moderation things really well, but the interface is different than what people expect in a "modern" communication tool. Essentially, each channel on Slack is a forum, each post is a new thread, and replies to that post are replies to that thread. The closest Slack competitor that thinks in these terms is Zulip.

It seems like a theme could be designed for SMF that mimics Slack (and alternatives) but allows advanced moderation and permissions. One question I have is whether the backend could work with a theme that does push updates (AJAX?). Would this be different than running a lot of users making requests all the time anyway?

Or is a theme the wrong way to go, and a better way to build out the SMF API to the point where native apps could be built that would work like Slack?

Open to any ideas. Unfortunately I'm pretty rusty with SMF development, but it seems like others must be looking for a similar solution.



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