Once upon a time, I did customer support at a growing startup. The company had a system where each support ticket was tracked in SalesForce with a specific ID. In slack, a new thread would be spawned with that ID in the title. When we closed the support ticket, we would archive the slack thread.
And slackbot would dutifully notify every participant that the thread was archived. And there was no way to disable that "feature", even after talking to Slack's customer support about it.
And it drove me insane.
I had to have slack notifications work, because that was the primary method of communication for my workplace. And my notification stream was being constantly polluted by slackbot!
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The lesson here? Let your users change their fucking settings!
Why is this so hard to understand? You can't decide how a company is going to use/abuse your product, and the employee working at that company probably can't either. So let them configure your product!!
Especially when it comes to notifications. Every app that makes a notification should provide settings to disable them at a bare minimum. How did we get so bad at this? It's fucking obvious, isn't it? Don't you hate having your life get interrupted by some bullshit notification you can't disable? How are you OK with doing that to anyone else?
Yet somehow this is the norm. Very few sms apps let you mute group texts. My Samsung phone buzzes at me in the middle of the night to let me know it disabled some unused apps. And I can't even disable that notification! How did anyone let that shit fly through QA?
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Anyway, sorry for getting so upset in public. It's been years, and I'm still not over it.
Notifications suck hard, right in your face, and it's for no good reason in the first place. I'm tired. Aren't you?
The fact that you cannot configure or control Slackbot in any way is a _huge_ hole in the Slack feature set. You can't even mute it - I cannot say how many times I've been interrupted by a useless notification from Slackbot.
And slackbot would dutifully notify every participant that the thread was archived. And there was no way to disable that "feature", even after talking to Slack's customer support about it.
And it drove me insane.
I had to have slack notifications work, because that was the primary method of communication for my workplace. And my notification stream was being constantly polluted by slackbot!
---
The lesson here? Let your users change their fucking settings!
Why is this so hard to understand? You can't decide how a company is going to use/abuse your product, and the employee working at that company probably can't either. So let them configure your product!!
Especially when it comes to notifications. Every app that makes a notification should provide settings to disable them at a bare minimum. How did we get so bad at this? It's fucking obvious, isn't it? Don't you hate having your life get interrupted by some bullshit notification you can't disable? How are you OK with doing that to anyone else?
Yet somehow this is the norm. Very few sms apps let you mute group texts. My Samsung phone buzzes at me in the middle of the night to let me know it disabled some unused apps. And I can't even disable that notification! How did anyone let that shit fly through QA?
---
Anyway, sorry for getting so upset in public. It's been years, and I'm still not over it.
Notifications suck hard, right in your face, and it's for no good reason in the first place. I'm tired. Aren't you?