Slack integration channel setup is needlessly painful

paulpharr

I just removed and re-added the slack integration to be able to start using slack invitations - they look really nice.

When I re-added the 1password slack app, I needed to reconfigure my 2 notification channels and encountered two problems:

First, the instruction to add the new app to private channels is a little subtle and I missed it - so I went exploring the channel menus

They contained all of our hundreds of public slack channels UNSORTED and unfilterable - so I spent 20 minutes slowly and painstakingly searching the list one by one and never found my private channels

after finally giving up, I saw the note, added the app to the private channels and got it configured - even then, the private channels were at the END of the list of hundreds of channels

1 - Please sort the list
2 - Please put all of the private channels with the app invited at the top of the list - those are 99% likely the ones the user wants
3 - there are lots of other smaller ways you could improve this, but if you do the super-simple #1 and #2 I don't think they'd be worth it

[Is this the best place to post feedback where I'm not really looking for a response?]

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1Password Version: Not Provided
Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version: Not Provided
Sync Type: Not Provided

ag_joshua

Hi there, @paulpharr! Sharing feedback here in the Support Community is great since this gives us a chance to have a discussion before involving other members of our team, and I really appreciate you taking the time to share your experience with our Slack integration. :smile:

After testing this out, I can absolutely understand how the process of both adding the 1Password app in Slack to a private channel and scrolling down to the bottom of a long list to find private channels isn't ideal. I'd also love to see a sorted list of channels myself, and it makes sense to see private channels at the top.

I'll be sure to bring this up with the rest of the team to get a discussion started on ways we could improve how this is all displayed for our customers. Please let me know if you have any other thoughts on how we could improve our integration with Slack! :+1:

paulpharr

Since you asked - one more minor thing is that your slack app chooses to not show itself as active. Im not sure if this is intentional, but most apps show themselves as active & online - 1Password always appears offline, which is a little confusing.

ag_ana

@paulpharr:

Thank you for the patience, and sorry for the long wait. I have sent your question directly to the developers, I will post back here as soon as I hear something back :+1:

bundtkate

Hey, @paulpharr! I hope you don't mind my hopping in for Ana here. We just recently pushed out an update to our Slack app so that it uses Slack's new more granular permission framework and is able to work in Workspaces that are part of a grid organization. Folks already using the Slack app won't have noticed anything new, but it did result in me spending quite a bit of time putting it through its paces so your inquiry caught my eye. Honest it never occurred to me personally to so much as look at the active status of our app so I had a brief chat with the team that worked on those updates with me and so far it seems I'm not alone there.

Ultimately, I don't believe there was any intent at all behind making it show active or inactive. At the moment, our Slack app isn't interactive, really. It won't respond to messages of any sort and can't be triggered by activity within Slack. You could set it up and use it for an extended period of time without having any need to look in the apps section of Slack, which is why I think this ended up flying under the radar.

So, should it say it's active? Honest, I can see this both ways. On the one hand, it's always in the background waiting to give you a heads up about activity on your 1Password account so it's always active in a sense. Plus, I might view an inactive app as a signal it's not working so that's a bit confusing. On the other, it's not going to respond to any input you give it (yet) so you can also think of it like a human that's head down doing work and doesn't want to be bothered. It's not quite smart enough yet to set a status to that effect or use DND, so it does the best it can.

I personally lean in the direction of this being a bug, based largely on the idea that an inactive app looks like it's offline and not doing its job (to me anyway). But, I've gone ahead and raised it with our development team as something to ponder. We also have a few things in mind that could allow our Slack app to be a bit more interactive in the future, so this is something that's likely to change if and when any of those features get implemented. For now, you'll have to forgive the little guy for being a bit standoff-ish. I can assure you he doesn't mean anything by it and will continue sharing your team's activities as configured.

paulpharr

In my experience Slack is happy to advise on best practices here

From my POV, I think slack apps typically stay active unless showing an inactive state means something important. I think it Is safe for you to make 1Pass a green dot (which is trivially easy for your team), until such a time as you decide to meaningfully support both active and inactive states.

I don't think showing an active state implies that the user expects to be able to have a conversation with your 1pass-bot.

Thanks!

Paul

john_m

No problem @paulpharr! @bundtkate has passed on your feedback to our engineering team here, who'll weigh it in with future decisions they make on updates to the Slack integration for 1Password. If there's anything else she or I can do for you in the meantime on this topic, just let me know :+1: