Investigate Slack integration

I know we talked about this before internally, and it’s not a development issue, but I wanted to create a ticket to track it somehow and get more feedback.

I’d love to have a Slack channel for Scrapy since that’s where most of Scrapinghub inter-company communication takes place, I’m sure it’d be a lot easier to provide Scrapy support if we used it (and personally I’m not very fond of IRC).

I think this is possible, I just stumbled upon this repo: gamechanger/dusty which uses this slacking app (http://rauchg.com/slackin/) to create a “public” (through invite) channel for the project. I kind of like the approach, and I think it’s worth at least investigating it to integrate it to our current work env.

[jdemaeyer]

Given the latest comments and the fact that googling “Scrapy Slack” leads here, maybe a little clarification is in order:

This issue is not about the technical integration of Scrapy with Slack (which should be relatively straight-forward with Slack Incoming Webhooks and a small Scrapy pipeline/extension like this one or the one @ttilberg posted above). 🙂

The question discussed here is about finding a home for the Scrapy community, which is currently scattered among a little-used IRC channel, a low-volume subreddit, and the “scrapy” Stack Overflow tag. While there’s definitely the most users active at the latter, Stack Overflow simply isn’t intended to be a “community home”.

[Gallaecio]

If we wish to use open source software for communications, we could consider Matrix, possibly with a bridge to the current IRC channel.