Slack bot support tracker

[EDsCODE]

Goal:
Reproduce all the content within our posthog users slack group into a forum under the posthog.com domain.

Motive:
The content will be publicly available and searchable so that any google queries for any problems related to posthog should provide users with an easy way to discover the answer.

How:
Have a slack bot that tracks all the threads in general and pipe this data as needed

Key points:

• Grab the entire history in the slack group and backfill the forum.
• Set up a slack bot that will actively listen for new posts and threads
• Make sure it's clear that we're displaying all questions and answers publicly on our website
• Host threads on website in a way that it's discoverable in a google search

Open Questions:

• Should we anonymize the user name when the comment/question is reproduced on our website? Or should we let the bot figure out
• Can people respond/ask questions on this forum directly? (This would require building an entire forum site with all related functionality)

[jamesefhawkins]

Why this matters:

• The primary benefit: Makes it easier for users to work out how to fix problems, which will increase retention. I already feel myself searching PostHog's docs via google. I know for other technologies I'd just google my problem. This makes that possible. There would be other ways to solve this but:
  • We are now losing slack messages as we don't have paid slack for the community (it is unaffordable to do that)
  • Getting people to move to a different place means we'd have to reset the community which is getting vibrant
  • Slack feels informal and allows us to create ie private rooms where needed, so we feel closer to users.
• Secondary is SEO benefit. We'll probably just get extra traffic from a new user acquisition perspective.

I don't really see anything outside the two above needed.

Can people respond/ask questions on this forum directly? (This would require building an entire forum site with all related functionality)

I don't think this is an advantage so it's not worth the extra effort to do this. We're probably best off if we just have a ridiculously obvious way to take them to slack. It'd be amazing to take them to the actual thread but I suspect that's not possible.

Should we anonymize the user name when the comment/question is reproduced on our website? Or should we let the bot figure out

I think if it's publicly mentioned in Slack then this feels appropriate, as I think it'd look a bit weird if everything is anonymized. I'd definitely not ie put their email in on the website, even if it's publicly there in Slack.