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Comment by reustle | Hacker News Reader

I understand slack integration for some tools, but is this slackbot-as-a-product thing going to become the new fad? What if I want to use your tool without using slack?

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Agreed - I was ready to sign up until I realized it was slack alerts, not emails.

I'm wondering if it's related to Slack providing seed money for startups [1].

[1] http://fortune.com/2015/12/15/slack-app-investment-fund/

Nope, although we do have a good relationship with Slack.

We started with Slack cause it's really easy to get started with and a lot of people, including ourselves, use Slack as the central repository of what's going on in the organization.

We realize that it's not for everybody though, more options will be coming soon.

I tried setting it up to post to my Slackbot but hesitated at the permissions (giving away everyone's email in particular, when I just want to notify myself right now.)

I feel like a shitty tirekicker for complaining, but I really would rather just get email alerts and then optionally integrate with Slack directly or via webhook/Zapier. The service feels a bit inaccessible.

Good to know, thanks.

We would also prefer not to ask for that permission. In fact, the only reason we do it is be able to call Slack's `users.info` API on your user. Which... we're only doing in order to be able to show a profile picture and your real name. Those things are nice, but not must haves.

I'll make a note to get rid of that permission!

Oh, yes, if that's all then I support typing in my name myself after account creation. :) Funny how such things have to go with APIs sometimes.

I was thinking the same thing. I'm interested in trying it out, but do I really feel like setting up slack for a side project when I'm the only one that works on it?

You can have it just post to you in Slack if you don't want to bother other people.

What's your preferred notification system?

No I mean a personal side-project that I have no slack set up for because I'm literally the only person that works on it. Not just the only person on a project in a company.

Anyway, email would probably be fine for me.

We plan on supporting other workflows soon, we just started with Slack cause that's what we use.

Next stop is probably email. Any other integration you'd like to see?

I've worked with many systems like this and know that notifications are too easy for individuals to ignore. Your primary action should be to open an issue in a bug tracking system, and let that system trigger the email/instant notification. This helps teams get a better picture of bug volume/impact/area over time, allows for prioritization of work and ensures issues don't get lost during major bug storms.

Also, being able to link a bug conclusively to a changeset, build or a deployment ID would be very valuable. Rather than building lots of deep CI integrations, you could do this by allow users to configure your monitor to look for version numbers in server hints (headers, hidden fields, status pages, etc).

How about an RSS feed?

Yep, same here FYI. I was bummed to see slack-only signup, and stopped because I didn't want to share my teammates' profiles.

Right now, it's starting to look like Slack is becoming the new email.

I used to suffer from having 100 emails to shift through everyday. Now I just have to shift through 100 Slack channels!

slackbot-monitoring-without-slack-as-a-product

Coming soon to Spotbot :)

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