Why Does Slack Wipe Old Chats?

[Heatman]

Slack is one of the best work communication channels I've used for years. I love how everything is set up in the app or website version which have made me stick with it for a long time. But one thing which I find very displeasing with Slack is the wiping of old chat history. I've lost two of my personal chat with my friends and I don't think there's any way to recover those chats.

Is there any way to prevent chat being wiped on Slack?

 

[JoshB]

Slack is a great service for the business side of things. The purpose of the 90-day message history is that everything that you put into chat is stored on Slack's servers. It's an upsell ladder format for companies to move to the more expensive/enterprise tiers as Slack wants you to do.

If preserving message history is important I would suggest either Microsoft Teams or Discord. Another option is to copy that important information into a secure place like a password manager or within a cloud vault.

 

[Ryan Ashbrook]

Slack is not a permanent storage for communication. Neither is Discord, or any chat application.

It's great for real-time - truly, and I will advocate for that every time. But if you need long term storage on communication, it's best you establish that yourself.

 

[Ravenfreak]

Word of advice, if you get a very important message on Discord or Slack, save it since it won't be online forever. This is one of the reasons why I prefer to have a forum over a server. Slack is good for those needing to communicate with their team, but it's a good solution for long term conversations. Likewise with Discord, it's great for gamers to hop in on a voice call and play games with their friends. Research communities shouldn't be on a Discord server though.