A new way to share messages across channels — using emoji

Work conversations are not naturally very tidy. In Slack, things talked about in one place often need to be shared elsewhere; ideas that bubble up as part of one project would also work for another; feedback brought through a small team would benefit a larger number of people. Messages, in short, sometimes need to be seen by more than one channel.

You can already share a message from the message menu in Slack, and if you need to add context, that’s great — but if you want to gather messages from lots of channels into one place, there’s never been a way to do that with one-click.

Until now. It’s the Reacji Channeler. A silly name for a useful tool — something to swiftly copy a message from one channel (or multiple channels) into another. We built it for our own team and found it so useful that we decided to make it available to others.

The premise is simple. Once installed, you choose an emoji, and designate a channel. Whenever anyone adds that emoji as a reaction (or, reacji, a term which we’re stubbornly trying to make happen) to a message in any public channel, it will immediately get pushed into the channel you’ve designated.

Bear with us: This is easier to explain with examples.

Let the record show

On our Platform team, open discussion happens in channels about various apps and partners. This keeps all of our conversations organized, but it used to be hard to make sure everyone was aware of the important decisions being made across all our channels. Now, whenever a final decision is made on anything, it’s marked with a gavel reacji — a custom emoji, but one with an agreed purpose.

Anything with the gavel reacji goes into a #platform-decisions channel that serves as a system of record. If you need more context, click on the message to zoom back in time and view the original conversation. Simple.

All the news you need to know.

Sometimes, important messages are scattered across all your channels. Perhaps there’s a message about an office closure for the holidays in your #announcements channel, or a new course posted in #learning-development. Now, you can create a #things-to-know channel to collect and surface important messages from across your company.

 

 

For this, we recommend using a newspaper emoji — or a variation of your company logo — to help gather everything newsworthy in one place.

Celebrate good times (come on!)

There are countless ways you can get creative with the Reacji Channeler. Try routing all the very worst best jokes and puns into an #airhorn channel, or collecting every message with the :tada: reacji in a #happy-times channel. It’s lots of good news, and celebrations of success. And sometimes, just sometimes, it tells you which corner of the office might be harboring cake.

Using the Reacji Channeler

We’ve found that custom emoji work best with the Reacji Channeler. Choosing a common emoji like :thumbs_up: would likely give you a potpourri of unrelated messages rather than a focused stream of information. So, we made a pack of some of our favorite custom emoji for you try out with your team.

Those are just a few ideas — we’ll get further into how we use this app at Slack to create a complex and deliberate workflow in another post. In the meantime, the Reacji Channeler is worth playing with and you can install or request it for your team today.

Come up with a cool, creative, or just straight up weird way to use the Reacji Channeler? Let us know on Twitter @SlackHQ.