How to get the paid features for free

How to make Slackord2 work for a virtual party room: How to Set up a Slaccord2 application for your Discord channel

Slack is great for companies, but less so for groups of friends and online communities. If you only want a chatroom for your friends, then you’ll have to pay $7.25 per user per month, which can add up quickly. It was last year I wrote about how to get the best features of Slack for free, the conclusion of which was to use Discord. That’s because Discord’s free version offers almost all of the features Slack puts behind a paywall.

The free version of Slack only lets users scroll up to or search for messages from the past 90 days—anything older can’t be found. Those messages aren’t gone, though—if you start paying they will all show up.

Click that again, then click the Export tab. Select the date range you want to download, and click Start Export. The export process could take anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of hours, depending on how big your Slack archive is. You will get a Slackbot DM when it’s done, though, so don’t feel like you need to leave the window open. When it’s ready, the archive will be a ZIP file, which you should unarchive.

If you want a public archive, check out Slack Saver. You can share a link to the entire archive with your entire community when uploading the ZIP file, but only after the conversion is done. It works, you have to occasional update it to include recent posts. Keep in mind that if you use web based services, you’re uploading a complete archive of conversations people might have thought of as private. Make sure your community is in agreement with that.

But Slack’s Huddles aren’t the only tool for the job. You could create a room in Gather, which makes virtual parties actually fun using pixel avatars that can move toward and away from each other. It’s perfect for the kind of drop-in/drop-out conversations that make Huddles so great. You can even link to a Gather room in the Topic of your Slack channels.

Now it’s time to set up Slackord2. This free application can connect to a Discord bot, parse the archives we just downloaded, and paste them into any Discord channel. I struggle with the instructions that are on the page, so I attempt to simplify things. I’m using the Windows version for this tutorial; it also works for Linux and macOS if you’re willing to use the command line.