Importing all your Slack archives in the Slackord2 application for online chatbots and chatbot aggregation
If you work for a company, you will know that the productivity network is worth paying for. If you’re using Slack for an online community, though, you should probably just stick with the free version.
There is another loophole. All data, including a complete backlog of messages, are able to be exported by admins. Go to the workspace settings in the menu. The settings will open in your browser—there’s an Import/Export Data button in the top-right corner. That’s right, click that. and you can choose a date range and export all messages. Free users cannot export Direct Messages or private channels. The actual archives come in a ZIP file full of JSON files, which aren’t the easiest thing in the world to read. Still, it’s all there.
First you will need to export your Slack archive. You need to be an admin in order to do this. In Slack, click the name of your Slack in the top-left corner, hover over Settings & administration, then click Workplace settings. You can see an export/import data button on the settings & permissions page in your browser.
If you’re interested in a public archive, check out Slack Saver. When the conversion is done, you can share the link to the complete archive with your entire community by uploading the ZIP file you exported. It works, you will need to update it occasionally to include recent posts. Just keep in mind, with web-based services, that you’re uploading a complete archive of conversations people might have thought of as semi-private. Make sure your community is OK with that before proceeding.
It’s not the only tool for the job. Creating a room in Gather is a great way to make virtual parties fun in ways that can’t be done in real life. It’s a perfect fit for the kinds of conversations that make Huddles great. You can even link to a Gather room in the Topic of your Slack channels.
Now it’s time to set up Slackord2. The application can connect to a Discord bot and get the archives we downloaded to be put into any Discord channel. There are instructions on the GitHub page that I struggled through–what follows is my attempt to simplify things. The command line is used for both the Windows version and the Linux version; it also works for macOS.