Figure out how to handle Slack threads correctly

[jvperrin]

Slack threads are tricky, because they can't be mirrored like normal messages, since they won't have the context of the original message. Maybe these could just be sent as a message starting with thread: or something? Not sure how else to do this, because they should be mirrored, but there isn't a good way to represent this on IRC. Even Slack's IRC gateway just shows them as normal messages, which can be pretty confusing.

[chriskuehl]

what if you just pass them verbatim? irc users are used to crosstalk

[jvperrin]

Maybe, the issue is that they have context in Slack, since they are shown under their parent message, but in IRC they will just look like a normal message. This can definitely get confusing, as I've been using the Slack IRC gateway recently (Slack's app takes up tons of memory), and when using it I've tried to reply to threads in the regular conversation and it gets pretty confusing because of the lack of knowledge from the IRC side that it's a thread that's being replied to.

[bzh-bzh]

Maybe threads could be manifest as a new bot in IRC, with users mentioning it on IRC to add replies.

[kkuehlz]

Common IRC behavior is to send the old message with the timestamp included when replying to a message from much earlier.

[21:09] <dwc> [18:03] <@keur> older message
[21:10] <dwc> response to above

With Slack threads we could take the most recent message in the chain and send it before adding the newest response.

I don't think we should bother going in the other direction. IRC users use IRC because they don't care about features such as threads.

[cg505]

I propose the following similar but more robust approach:

[21:09] <dwc> [18:03] <keur> older message
[21:09] <dwc> [thread 24] response to above
[21:10] <cooperc> non-thread talk
[21:11] <keur> [thread 24] response to dwc

This would make it pretty easy to respond in IRC to threads that were created on Slack. Creating threads in IRC seems hard and not worth it.