Gateways to close on May 15th, leaving you almost ten whole weeks to rebuild integrations
One of the virtues of cult messaging app Slack was its gateways allowing integration with the venerable IRC and XMPP messaging protocols.
Note that « was » we used back there, because Slack has announced it will close the gateways and apologised in advance for messing things up for users and those who built customisations using them.
In a brief announcement and lengthier explanation that only users can see, Slack said gateways to the older messaging standards will die on May 15th, 2018.
The gateways weren’t offered to new users as of March 6th and come April 3rd, 2018, they’ll be « Removed from workspaces where they’re not in use. »
On May 15th the gateways will close for all Slack users.
« As Slack has evolved over the years, we’ve built features and capabilities – like Shared Channels, Threads, and emoji reactions (to name a few) – that the IRC and XMPP gateways aren’t able to handle, » Slack said by way of explanation, adding « Our priority is to provide a secure and high-quality experience across all platforms, and so the time has come to close the gateways. »
Slack’s apologised in advance for those who used the gateways and said « We recognize removing these gateways may disrupt your work ». If you’re among the disrupted, Slack’s advanced its own Real Time Messaging and Events APIs as ideal replacements. And given you just under ten weeks to get them working with whatever you’ve built.
Good luck meeting that deadline, Slackers. The Register won’t be at all surprised if we soon find our operatives writing about you rising up to demand, and then being granted, more time to sort this out. ®
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