What Your Presence Reveals

Slack indicates presence for each member of a workspace with a small round , square , or a right-triangle icon that appears in all sorts of places: to the left of a person’s name, as in the main sidebar’s Direct Messages list; overlaid in the lower-right corner of their avatar, as in the Workspace Directory; and to the right of someone’s name, as in their profile.

This icon lets you see at a glance what someone’s current state of activity is in the workspace.

To see what your current presence is set as:

• In desktop and web apps, look to the left of your name at the top of the main sidebar, below the workspace name (Figure 84).

  

• In Android, tap the More Items button, and look at the overlay on your avatar.

• In iOS and iPadOS, it’s two steps: tap the More Items button, then tap your name. You can see presence to the right of your full name.

• In any app, if your name appears under the Direct Messages heading in the main sidebar, your presence is indicated to its left.

The presence icons are the same whether shown for you or any other member. If you are:

• Active: the icon is filled

• Away: the icon is hollow , as in Figure 84

• Do Not Disturb: the hollow icon is snoring with a z .

The icon’s color depends on Slack’s sidebar color scheme, but otherwise doesn’t mean anything.

Set Your Presence

To determine your presence, Slack combines your explicit choices, for example, when you manually set your status to away, and your implicit ones, where it watches your behavior to divine what you’re up to (and on which devices).

Generally, here’s how Slack infers your presence to set an implicit status:

• Active : Slack uses a different measure for each type of Slack app:

  • For a desktop app, this means Slack is running, and you’ve carried out any action in the app’s window, like typing or scrolling, within the last 30 minutes.

  • For the web app, Slack uses the same criteria as a desktop app, but also monitors other browser activity to determine a 30-minute inactive period.

  • For a mobile app, this means Slack is the foreground app and the mobile device is on. If you switch away, quit Slack manually, or lock your screen, you are no longer active.

• Away or Offline : Based on the above rules, Slack determines that you are inactive.

• Do Not Disturb : You’ve snoozed all notifications from the workspace either manually or through a Do Not Disturb schedule. (For more information, read the list just below.)

You can override Slack’s automatic presence indicator by forcing an explicit state of presence:

• Desktop and web apps: Click the workspace name at the top of the main sidebar and select “Set yourself to away” or “Set yourself to active” (Figure 85). (If you’re “away,” the word Away appears to the left of the menu item.)

  

• iOS/iPadOS app: Tap the More Items button, then tap Settings. Tap the Your Availability switch to toggle between Active and Away.

• Android app: Tap the More Items button, then tap Settings. Tap the Availability switch to toggle between the completely nonstandard Offline and Online options, which correspond to “away” and “active.”

If you’ve marked yourself as away, Slack will maintain your status and not override it with automatic presence changes until either you manually set yourself as active or one of two events happens:

• You log out of your workspace in any Slack app, then launch a Slack desktop app or open a tab with that workspace in a browser.

• You quit the desktop app or quit a browser in which Slack is open, and re-launch it.

At that point, Slack asks if you want to return to Active (Figure 86).

Of course, if you’re logged in to multiple Slack apps at once, you’ll be shown as Active whenever you move around among apps. I tend to quit Slack on the desktop (and close browser tabs) when I won’t use it for a while, as that makes Slack more reliable about notifying me regarding things that happen while I’m inactive.

Set Your Status

In addition to your implicit and explicit presence, you can also set a time-bounded status with an emoji and an optional bit of text. These status elements appear in a variety of places, just like presence.

The status emoji shows up after your name anywhere your name appears, both in your own Slack apps and in the sidebar, profile, and Workspace Directory for other people.

Status text appears in slightly fewer locations. If you hover over an emoji following someone’s name, in the desktop and web apps, any status text appears. In mobile apps, tapping a person’s name brings up their profile and shows their status emoji and text in the bar at the top.

You can set status in one of several ways:

• In your profile, click “Set a status” or Edit (desktop or web app), or tap the status field (mobile app).

• In desktop and web apps, click the workspace name, then click “Set a status” (Figure 87), or if one already exists, “Edit status.” You can also press ⌘/Control-Shift-Y.

  

• In a mobile app, tap the More Items button, then tap Set a Status (if not set) or tap the current status text to edit.

Your status message is paired with an optional expiration time. You can choose Don’t Clear to have it persist indefinitely, a period of time (like “4 hours”), or a custom time the same day or on a future date. That can be useful if you have a vacation, family leave, or sabbatical message you want in place for the duration.

What Slack Tracks

Slack’s notifications revolve around letting you know that something happened while you weren’t looking. Notifications trigger only for conversations to which you belong.

When you first set up an account in a workspace, you receive notifications only when one of the following events happens:

• You receive a direct message.

• You’re @mentioned by someone else in the workspace.

• A keyword you’ve set to follow is used in any conversation of which you’re a member. (I say more about this in a bit.)

• An announcement is made through a channel-wide or workspace-wide handle (@everyone or @channel, or @group-you’re-in with a paid plan).

Many of these events translate into visual notifications, while some can also trigger alert sounds, sliding banners, modal alerts, or email, depending on your settings.

The method of notification can depend on other settings, such as presence, Do Not Disturb status (discussed next in Do Not Disturb), and muting (discussed later in this section).

Visual Indicators

As noted in earlier chapters, an unread message turns the name of its channel or conversation in the main sidebar bold, while conversations also display the number of unread messages.

In the mobile apps, channels and conversations with unread messages appear under an Unread (or Unreads) heading in the main sidebar; a similar All Unreads heading appears in desktop and web apps if you have the setting enabled in Sidebar preferences.

In addition to those sidebar clues, you can see activity information on your Slack app icon in the form of a badge in macOS, Windows, iOS, and iPadOS apps:

• macOS: While the app is running, Slack marks activity on its Dock icon with a red circle around either a white dot, which indicates unread activity in any workspace to which you’re logged in, or a white number, which totals unread direct messages, @mentions, along with messages containing any highlight words (Figure 88).

  

  You control badges in two places in macOS:

  • Slack: Click the workspace name at the top of the sidebar, then click Preferences > Notifications. Uncheck “Show a badge on Slack’s icon to indicate new activity.” You can also check boxes for bouncing the Dock icon. Slack sends these visual notifications to your Mac based on your settings here.

  • System Preferences: To make the Mac ignore Slack’s badge notifications, go to the Notifications system preference pane, select Slack in the app list and uncheck “Badge app icon.”

• Windows 10: Slack, by default, puts an icon in the notifications area at the bottom of the screen. However, the Windows Action Center notification only shows a red circular badge with a white number for unread DMs. To adjust these:

  • Windows Actions Center: You can control Windows Action Center settings for when and how notifications show up by clicking the Start menu and selecting Settings > System > Notifications & actions, then selecting Slack. This offers an abundance of customization.

  • Slack notification control: Slack can instead put up its own visual indicators: visit the workspace preferences, select Notifications, then pick an option from “Deliver notifications via.” In that mode, the Slack icon appears in the status bar. It shows a red dot for any unread DMs, @mentions, or keywords, and a blue dot when there are new messages in any workspace. Notification messages appear as banners in whichever corner of the screen (and on which display) you choose.

• iOS/iPadOS: Slack in iOS and iPadOS allows very limited badging, which shows the number in a red circle for unread DMs. You can opt to turn this off via Settings > Notifications > Slack by turning off the Badges switch.

Set Notification Preferences

You likely need to pay closer attention to your job’s Slack workspace than the one your daughter’s soccer team uses to arrange carpools; likewise, some channels and conversations may require a quicker response.

Slack’s Notifications preferences offer extensive workplace-wide and channel-specific settings that sync across all apps you use (Figure 89). For instance, if you use the desktop or web app to set “Notify me about” to Nothing, every web, desktop, and mobile app you use adopts the same settings—instantly! (Slack refers to DM conversations as “channels” in this settings area.)

If you want to employ separate settings for mobile apps and desktop/web apps, you can:

• In a desktop or web app, open the Workspace menu at the top of the main sidebar, choose Preferences > Notifications, and select “Use different settings for my mobile devices.”

• In a mobile app, tap the More Items button, tap Settings > Notifications, and make changes in the “On mobile, notify me about” section at the top—any change here also automatically checks that “different settings” box.

Workspace-Wide Notifications

In desktop and web apps, use the options at the top of your Notifications preferences to set how Slack notifies you about specific occurrences in your workspace (see Figure 89, above):

• All new messages: Good gravy, you don’t want this. I can imagine only a few rare cases where you would you want every single thing that happens in any channel to be pushed as a notification.

• Direct messages, mentions, & keywords: This option has the best chance of meeting your needs. If you don’t have the app frontmost (desktop) or active (mobile), you get alerts from any response in a DM conversation, any time you’re @handle is mentioned, and about any highlight words you’ve marked (as discussed below).

• Nothing: Choose Nothing to disable notifications entirely. This is the only way to suppress notifications for direct messages. You can’t block direct message alerts by person, unlike the controls for channels and three-or-more-person DM conversations described below.

These settings, when changed in your desktop or web app, are applied to your mobile app too—unless you’ve chosen different options in the notifications preferences there, as described earlier.

Channel-Specific Notifications

If there are specific channels or conversations you need to pay closer attention to—or wish to ignore entirely—you can set that up on a case-by-case basis.

Let me first talk about desktop and web app options for channel notifications, as the mobile version is a little more restrictive.

You can bring up the notification preferences for a particular channel or group DM’s while viewing the conversation in a desktop or web app. Click the conversation name on the toolbar and choose Notification Preferences.

Alternatively, you can use the workspace’s preferences by clicking the Workspace name at the top of the main sidebar and selecting Preferences > Notifications. This is a good option if you want to set notifications for several channels in one place.

To get started making changes, click Add a Channel at the bottom of preference list, then either start typing to match a conversation or choose it from the popup menu. Click Next, and you can configure using the options that follow.

Each channel or group DM has two sections of preferences: Muting options and Notifications. The Muting options offer conversation-wide throttling:

• “Mute entire channel” or “Mute entire conversation” silences all notifications from the conversation. The conversation’s name is grayed out in the main sidebar, as well as demoted to the bottom of its respective section in some apps. When this option is checked, Slack hides the Notifications preferences below the muting section.

  Even with the conversation muted, the @channel and @here special handles can still tap you on the shoulder. Check “Ignore notifications for @channel and @here” to avoid that. You can also check that separately if the conversation isn’t muted.

• The Notifications section has one row for Desktop and one for Mobile settings and three categories that mirror the workspace-wide options above: All new messages, Just mentions (keywords and @handle), and Nothing (Figure 90). These are effectively the same as workspace-wide notifications, with the exception that DMs aren’t listed alongside mentions, as they’re a different kind of conversation.

  

To customize channel notifications in a mobile app, tap the More Items button, tap Settings > Notifications > Channel-Specific Notifications, which has a number to its right indicating how many overrides there are currently.

Conversations appear in alphabetical order, with details about what kinds of settings have been applied. Tap a conversation name, and you can apply mute and ignore @channel and @here to all apps, and use the “On mobile, notify me about” settings to make mobile-only modifications.

Once you’ve added any channel-specific notification preferences, every app shows a list of which channels have local overrides set (Figure 91).

If you don’t like the changes you made for a channel and want to go back to the Slack defaults, click “Reset to your default notification settings” in desktop and web apps or Reset to Default Settings in a mobile app.

Additional Settings

Two more settings in the main Notifications preferences are worth poking at in a little more depth:

• Email (desktop, web): Slack can send you email about @mentions of your name and direct messages when you’re idle in desktop and web apps. For some people, it’s a great alternative to push notifications, allowing you to control when you see these updates without being interrupted by them or having to use the Slack app to catch up. Check the “Send me email notifications” box, then click “change” to set how often you want to receive emails: either 15 minutes or one hour.

• My keywords (all apps): This interesting option lets you be notified when words or phrases you select appear in messages in any of your conversations (Figure 92). This can help when you’ve muted certain channels or conversations, but want to know when a subject is mentioned. When someone mentions a listed keyword, it increments a badge (in apps that show a badge and have badging enabled) and will notify you—so long as you haven’t set your Notifications preferences to Nothing for the channel or workspace.

Control Slack Notifications on Your Device

Whatever your notification settings, Slack will send those notifications as push messages to your operating system or web browser. However, you can use your operating system or browser to temper or override Slack’s pings. For example, on your Mac, you might want just a banner to slide by, but on your Android smartphone you might want an alert sound.

Here’s a quick look at where to specify these options:

• macOS: Go to System Preferences > Notifications, and select Slack in the left-hand list.

• Windows 10: Go to Start menu > Settings > System > Notifications & Actions, and select Slack.

• iOS/iPadOS: Tap Settings > Notifications > Slack.

• Android: Varies. Typically, tap Settings > Apps or Apps & Notifications, and tap Slack.

With desktop browsers (minimum version tested listed below), once you’ve approved the receipt of Slack notifications in the browser, the entries for notifications are shown for each Slack subdomain, in the form workspace-name.slack.com:

• Chrome 78: Open Settings from the More menu, then click Advanced > Privacy and security > Site settings > Notifications. You can then view a list of per site-settings.

• Firefox 44: Choose Firefox > Preferences > Privacy & Security > Permissions and, to the right of Notifications, click the Settings button. This shows site-by-site notification options.

• Safari 13: Choose Safari > Preferences > Websites > Notifications and scroll to the particular Slack subdomain to change notifications.

• Microsoft Edge: Click the More button in the upper-right corner while viewing a Slack workspace. Click Settings > View advanced settings > Manage (under Notifications). Set the switch to the off position for the Slack subdomain.