Optionally threading posts to parent topic in slack integration

Feature
8

I’ve been thinking about this and reading the chat.postMessage slack API docs, and I believe I can boil down my wall of words to something much simpler.

Only watch and not follow has the ability to choose threading responses, by a mechanism I’m still trying to determine. Alternatively, @david what would you think of a new thread rule filter with precedence mute thread watch follow, and plumbing the rule through trigger_notification to enable rule-sensitive behavior?

  1. If watch is configured to thread (alternatively, a thread rule is defined), sending a new post notification to a slack channel, if the post topic has a slack ts associated with it, post to that slack thread by setting thread_ts to the provided ts value from Slack.

  2. When sending a new post notification to a slack channel, and the post topic does not have a ts associated with it, store the returned response ts for the topic (so that future posts on the topic can be threaded if watch is configured for threads).

  3. When using the post thread :thread_url command, store the thread ts in the topic that is created, which will be used only by threaded watch rules.

Here are my current thoughts and concerns:

  1. How to determine whether to post to threads on a per-rule basis. A new filter feels easiest to me at the moment, but maybe I’m missing something.

  2. Flowing the original slack post URL and thread ID through the transcript flow is what is most opaque to me right now. This looks like I really need to add a per-provider thread ID somewhere and preserve it until saving the post. I would implement it only for slack ts but presumably it won’t be the only chat integration with threads.

  3. For posting, I think I need to store the slack ts in a slack-specific custom field on Topic, not a general DiscourseChat custom thread field.

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