Slack: Post chat snapshot to Discourse

[erlend_sh (Erlend Sogge Heggen)]

Continuation of GitHub - discourse/discourse-slack-official: DEPRECATED: Official Slack integration for Discourse

Summary

Take a snapshot of a discussion in Slack and post it as a topic in Discourse. The output should be a cleanly formatted chat transcript. The average snapshot would be between 5-100 messages long. Also see “Wisemonk - a Slack bot to move discussions from Slack to Discourse”.

Use Discourse as your “long term memory” for Slack conversations worth remembering.

Core functionality

1. Type a command like /topic last:50 category:staff in Slack.
2. @system (or other designated user) create a new topic in the #staff category. This topic will contain your 50 last Slack messages (in plaintext or minimal Markdown).

Stretch goals

• Set custom timegap for the snapshot: from:15:35-16:10 (might be tricky due to timezone differences)
• Ignore messages from selected users in snapshot: ignore:bob,sara
• Post as the user who issues the command via Slack
• Open pre-filled topic in browser instead of posting directly
• A graphical interface for posting snapshots. Might be possible to do something using Slack Buttons.

[mcwumbly (Dave McClure)]

What about a “pull” approach instead of “push”?

Workflow:

1. Copy link to particular slack message
2. Paste it into discourse
3. Onebox has settings for authentication with private slack instances to feature message
4. Onebox appends something like [before:0,after:0] to the end of the link, indicating that it’s going to suck in 0 messages before and after the link (maybe site settings to control those defaults?)
5. User can edit the plaintext to add more messages before and after the post

I think this would be easier to reason about, and allow pasting slack messages as a new topic or inside any post…

I’m calling it “Onebox” above, but maybe its more of a hybrid onebox/plugin thing… not sure the implementation, just using it as a shorthand for the UX.

[erlend_sh (Erlend Sogge Heggen)]

Certainly worth considering. @vinothkannans is gonna be working on this, so if our initial plan fails, he can try the “pull approach” instead.

[david (David Taylor)]

Onebox has settings for authentication with private slack instances to feature message

Just a quick thought on this - it’s quite a security risk to add oneboxing capability to slack messages… The links to messages on slack are essentially

/channel_id/message_timestamp

so not exactly hard for someone to guess. Then if they wanted to read your private Slack messages they could make requests to something like

https://meta.discourse.org/onebox?url=myorg.slack.com/archive/channel_id/message

Not necessarily a deal-breaker depending on the organisation, but something to bear in mind if someone does implement this “pull approach”. Should be reasonably safe in a login_required discourse instance.

[erlend_sh (Erlend Sogge Heggen)]

Completed:

Set up Slack notifications using the discourse-chat-integration plugin

This #howto describes how to setup the Slack provider included in discourse-chat-integration. It allows posting notifications to Slack, managing rules using Slash Commands, and posting transcripts back to Discourse (/discourse post 20 will create a draft topic containing the last 20 slack messages). Install If you haven’t already, install the discourse-chat-integration plugin Setup Slack Head over to Slack API: Applications | Slack and create a new app. If you’re not already logged in, you’…