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Have you ever submitted an app to the Slack directory? How was your experience? (Also, would you like to test a new thing?)

I'm working on Slack integration for PMAlerts (a social listening tool), and I'm at a point where "it works on my machine", but I need to validate that it works well on others' too. My plan:

  1. Write a post detailing how/why to add it to Slack (drafted)
  2. Share this on HackerNews and relevant Reddit communities
  3. Confirm that ten workspaces are using it without any issues before submitting

Official Slack guidance says that I only need two workspaces to be using it, but given how much noise social listening can generate, I want to be super conservative here and make sure the notification UX is solid.

Does this seem like a good plan? Would especially love to hear from anyone who's worked through the submission process before - wondering what "gotchas" I might encounter along the way.

Also, if you're on Slack and want to give my baby a whirl, I'd love to make it happen!

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    We submitted a bot to the Slack app directory a few years ago. It was a fairly arduous back and forth process from memory, but Slack were actually pretty helpful. Lots of t's to cross and i's to dot to get there, and actually, we have to make changes to it now due to their new granular security requirements.

    Took us a few months in the end!

    If you need testers, feel free to ping me (email in my profile) and I'd be happy to set up a PMAlerts integration in our Slack system. We actually used to use another service to get social media mentions in our Slack channel, but they disappeared off the face of the earth a while back, which was annoying! :)

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      Based on your comment, I think I'll just go ahead and submit to begin crossing those T's sooner rather than later. Thanks for the heads up about that.

      I'll absolutely ping you - @pablius is helping me nail down the granular security requirements right now, actually. I ran into a couple gotchas that you might hit:

      1. For OAuth v1, I was using basic auth headers containing my client_id and client_secret. That stopped working for some reason, so I had to move them into URI parameters of the POST request for v2.

      2. You receive a different data structure from v2 when converting your oauth code into a token. There's now a Team object with Id and Name, instead of being represented as Team_id and Team_name, for example.

      Thanks Devan!

      1. 2

        Great! Thanks for the heads up on the changes with granular security Mick! 👍

  2. 2

    Sure thing, lets try! Sounds super interesting

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      (connected on Twitter - thanks again @pablius)

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    I have, and I got my app featured.

    1. 1

      Very cool - was it Sidebar? How's it going? I tried finding your app but couldn't :(

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