Slack Channel about site

[kremalicious]

Ideal case: everything should be instant and automatic so we would use http://rauchg.com/slackin/ which is kinda the standard of dealing with Slack's non-public situation. Best UX cause users can join when they think they want to join so would expect best conversion rate with this approach. Downside: requires to install and maintain web app on some cloud service, like Heroku.

20-minutes-just-get-it-done case: we just put an email capture form under bigchaindb.com/slack (bigchaindb.slack.com isn't possible cause we don't control the root domain, slack.com). And send entries via http://formspree.io for free to an email address. Downside: users might not join cause they get invite hours later cause you have to sleep sometime.

If it's absolutely necessary right now, we should do iterative approach and implement 2nd choice now and 1st choice later

[kremalicious]

Bootstrap does that as an example: http://bootstrap-slack.herokuapp.com

[WojHupert]

Is this helpful? It looks a bit like our case:

Slack was originally meant as a team communication platform, but it functions surprisingly well at large-scale as a community platform. Slack doesn’t allow people to sign up directly though. The team’s admin needs to invite people manually. Today, I’ll show how I combined a few services to fix that and transform Slack into a community platform.

https://levels.io/slack-typeform-auto-invite-sign-ups/

[TimDaub]

The react + flux team organized from the beginning in a slack channel.
Recently, they got thrown out of Slack though. Blog post: https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/10/19/reactiflux-is-moving-to-discord.html

What they're now using is an app called https://discordapp.com/
I've used it a couple of times. It's OK to use and you don't need to create an account immediately.
Alternatively, many Github repositories use https://gitter.im/ which is the designated solution for talking about code on Github.

[ttmc]

I was just browsing the BigchainDB website and noticed that the Community page doesn't have a link to a form where one can enter their email address to request access to the BigchainDB Slack team.

We don't need a 100% automated solution right now. If we get overwhelmed with Slack join requests, then maybe.

[ttmc]

Oh wait, I seem to remember @WojHupert saying something about holding off on Slack until there's a big-enough community to make it worthwhile (i.e. not a ghost town).

[WojHupert]

How big is the mailing list at this point?

[ttmc]

28 members, 8 from ascribe and 20 from outside of ascribe.

[kremalicious]

We checked out Gitter and it seems to be much better for our use case. We're going to use a public room in Gitter and put the link on Community page. So closing this here in favor of #62