We’re happy to announce that after researching and testing alternatives, the BAT team will transition from Slack to rocket.chat for open communication and collaboration with its community members. The transition begins Wednesday, 07.12.2017 at 11AM PDT.
Why are we leaving Slack?
The best current practice for blockchain project teams has been to use Slack for open communication. Until recently, this worked well. However, bad actors began taking advantage of this openness, attempting to scam participants.
BAT was not the only project to have its Slack channel impacted by these bad actors. Several blockchain projects were attacked simultaneously, in some cases by users with the same screen names. The BAT Slack monitors witnessed an increase in incidents and reports from our community concerning false information and fraudulent messages.
- Direct messages were used in some cases by users pretending to be BAT staff.
- The /remind Slackbot command was used on occasion to send false information.
- The Incoming Webhooks integration was used once to pose as the BAT APP and send messages about a fake “second sale.”
Experience shows that Slack was not designed for large communities that need to manage bad actors. So we reviewed and tested other platforms that promote transparent discussion while providing moderators and administrator additional control to remove bad actors.
After reviewing several options, we chose rocket.chat.
The transition process
- Beginning Wednesday, 07.12.2017 at 11AM PDT, the BAT team will transition daily discussion to https://basicattentiontoken.rocket.chat/
- Current BAT Slack users will not be migrated into rocket.chat.
- The BAT Slack will remain open for 7 days during the transition to rocket.chat.
- Channels in the BAT Slack will be updated to become read-only during this 7 day transition, and will include announcements about the transition.
- Our community managers will help facilitate the transition. We are also continuing to expand our team of community managers, with the goal of having full coverage across time zones on a 24/7 basis.
Friendly reminders
- The official source of accurate information regarding all things BAT remains the official website: https://basicattentiontoken.org
- BAT staff will not directly message users with important updates. Do not click links with “calls to action” that are sent in direct messages.
- When in doubt, ask questions in open channels, and please report suspicious users or activities to BAT administrators.
In conclusion, we still love Slack!
We want to emphasize that these issues do not reflect on Slack for its intended use cases. Slack is an awesome tool. As commonly used by enterprises, Slack teams do not have to worry about random users sending fraudulent messages from the slackbot. Internally, our team uses and enjoys Slack as a part of our regular workflow.
Also, we would like to add a huge thank you to everyone in our Slack community, and those from other project teams that reported bad actors and other incidents that occurred over the past two weeks. We look forward to continuing the open discussion and engagement with the community as we build the BAT platform.