Simple Machines Forum VS zulip-archive

Do yourself a favor and avoid SMF if possible. It "works", but has terrible code quality (prime example [1]) and the addon/module system operates by diffing the original PHP source file and then patching in the needed changes. As you can imagine, this quickly leads to a lot of issues when updating or using multiple addons.

[1] https://github.com/SimpleMachines/SMF2.1/blob/release-2.1/So...

You can do search engine indexing via https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive; it defaults to archiving your public access streams.

We will eventually support search engine indexing without the extra overhead of running a separate archive tool (likely as an organization-level settings checkbox, since not everyone who wants public access wants search engine indexing).

I've also mentioned this in a separate comment in the post but reposting here for visibility:

To clarify Zulip let's you export their conversations and then render it by generating a static HTMl similar to https://leanprover-community.github.io/archive/ You'd have to use https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive to achieve. You can see it in the Caveats sections in their documentation https://zulip.com/help/public-access-option#caveats They are working on it here: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/21881

Zulip has both a business model and an official archiving tool.

Yes, the web-public view is being actively worked on: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues?q=label%3A%22area%3A+w...

There’s also a separate zulip-archive project that exports Zulip streams to static HTML: https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive

Search engine indexing is available in Zulip today via Zulip's public archive tool (https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive). Many larger OSS projects using Zulip, like Rust, Julia, and Lean Prover, use it.

We expect to have a native feature allowing a configurable set of streams to be browsed using a real Zulip web app UI without creating an account, available in beta in the next few weeks; we're actively integrating the implementation via https://github.com/zulip/zulip/pull/18532.

We plan to look at optional search indexing in that native implementation once the logged-out access feature is complete complete.

I lead the Zulip project.

I'm not sure about this detail of Slack's ToS. At a technical level, you can certainly export your data from a Slack (which is we implement https://zulip.com/help/import-from-slack); I imagine it's easy to write a tool to format and publish it.

FWIW Zulip maintains https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive, which is a configurable API-based tool for creating a static HTML archive from a Zulip organization, with tooling to update it every few minutes. A lot of larger open projects use it. (We're also working on a native logged-out access feature with less janky formatting, which has a working PR that we need to integrate).

I suppose you could export your data from Slack, import it into Zulip, and then publish that using zulip-archive if you didn't want to write any code, but I'm sure the formatting would be better preserved if one avoided the "convert Slack markup to Zulip markup" step.

It's quite sad Slack and Discord are often the first choice for open communities. They are siloed and unless you are deliberately searching in a specific workspace, you'll never run into the information in a search engine.

In comparison, Zulip:

- provides HTML export functionality https://github.com/zulip/zulip-archive#zulip-html-archive (example https://leanprover-community.github.io/archive )

- URLs are nice and encode meaning (e.g. https://memex.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/279601-hpi/topic/...)