Create topics in slack on the fly

Question

I'm not entirely sure this is a good fit for Stack Overflow... Just a quick question which hopefully many will find useful.

I see you can use hashtags, but that they have to correspond to existing channels. I have a channel tied to a project that gets a lot of automated notifications. I want to leave a message in that channel that I will later be able to find by searching through topics.

I do not want 100's of channels.

Answer 1

TL;DR

Emojis are the Slack component that most resemble tagging. Custom emojis provide flexibility. The Slack paradigm emphasizes keyword searches over tagging. Channels are like tags, but not really. It's best to think of channels as their own thing and not as tags.

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First, let's define expected tag behavior...

1. A tag can be assigned to any content in any channel
2. A search for a tag returns all items with that tag
3. Tag assignment is aided by a tag list (to provide guidance and avoid different tags for the same subject)

If we look at the usual suspects when looking for this functionality in Slack we don't exactly see what we'd expect...

• #ChannelName creates a link to a channel (it does NOT also post to a channel).
• @Person notifies a person (it does NOT also post as a direct message).

The use of hash # for channels seems to suggest that chanels are like tags, but the behavior does not entirely follow:

1. You cannot assign a new channel from another channel
2. You CAN search for a specific channel
3. #ChannelName DOES provide a fixed list, but this forces you to use your channel list as a tag list (as suggested by the OP)

Ok, so there is some similarity, but obviously channels are not designed to work like tags. If we continue to try and shoehorn channels to be like tags, we could remedy the biggest problem of assignment by using an app like Reacji Channeler. That allows content to be forwarded from one channel to others based on mapping emoji responses to channels. This is still unsatisfactory to me. Although very similar, channels are channels and tags are tags, and it seems a bit contorted to mix the two, you want to keep them separate, especially when it comes to the list as mentioned by the OP.

So, is there such a thing as a tag in Slack??

At first glance, the answer is nope, there isn't. Although this might seem like a huge oversight by Slack, it's actually part of the utility of it. There are no tags because EVERYTHING is like a tag. Slack is designed to be easily searchable and for searches to be your primary query. So rather than sticking stuff in bins (by tagging), just include keywords in content to easily find it again. The letdown here for a tag purist though is the third requirement listed above about needing a tag list: you don't have a fixed list of tags or bins that you can throw stuff in. This can be especially important if you have a very generic word or concept and are trying to avoid low signal to noise ration (as in the OP). As it turns out, having realized the list requirement as being the only real shortcoming in Slack's natural queries, a surprising answer emerges...

In Slack, emojis are tags.

Emojis on their own provide all the requirements of a tag paradigm.

1. Emojis can be added anywhere
2. You can uniquely and globally search for emojis
3. You can access an Emoji list by clicking the emoji icon or by typing : followed by the emoji name, with a list of possible names appearing as you type. You can also customize your emoji mapping and add new emojis.

There's even the added benefit that emojis are strong visual items and get displayed under content in a way very similar to tags. The custom emoji aspect is very nice because it means you can create emojis that are more explicit about their tagging nature by using a naming convention like this :tag_bug :tag_todo :tag_deployment, et voilà, we have some tags :)

Answer 2

In contrast to twitter and other similar services in Slack the hashtag # is used to identify a specific channel, not for tagging a topic to a message. So #general is a reference to the channel names "general". As far as I know there is no mechanism in Slack to add tags to a message.

However you can achieve something similar with the search function. It will find any message that contains certain keywords. Use in: to narrow your search to a specific channel.