Slack answer only to a thread and not to the main channel at the same time

[JoseRG]

The idea is:

When answering to a slack message (using the slack message send operation with the option to reply to a message it works but at the same time that ir replies to the specific message it also publishes the reply on the channel which I would like to avoid

My use case:

{
“nodes”: [
{
“parameters”: {
“select”: “channel”,
“channelId”: {
“__rl”: true,
“value”: “C087VUSS9FZ”,
“mode”: “list”,
“cachedResultName”: “create-short-form-video”
},
“text”: “={{ $json.output.toJsonString() }}”,
“otherOptions”: {
“includeLinkToWorkflow”: false,
“thread_ts”: {
“replyValues”: {
“thread_ts”: “={{ $(‘Slack Trigger’).item.json.ts }}”,
“reply_broadcast”: true
}
}
}
},
“type”: “n8n-nodes-base.slack”,
“typeVersion”: 2.3,
“position”: [
4220,
0
],
“id”: “5f7b21ce-1368-4c39-809e-b6c8b88be88a”,
“name”: “Slack answer”,
“webhookId”: “cdfbf78e-8252-4d77-83eb-b7512800f0f6”,
“credentials”: {
“slackApi”: {
“id”: “kuGwXXboSsqSxdl7”,
“name”: “Slack account”
}
}
}
],
“connections”: {
“Slack answer”: {
“main”: [

]
}
},
“pinData”: {},
“meta”: {
“templateCredsSetupCompleted”: true,
“instanceId”: “5aa5d2a1603df28859474f270c5663bf0de5fdf9d6c795d12d01619750c46ce4”
}
}

I think it would be beneficial to add this because:

The slack channel gets so messy if not

Any resources to support this?

As far as I could investigate it is controlled by the reply_broadcast argument, here is the documentation

chat.postMessage method | Slack Developer Docs

Are you willing to work on this?

I don’t have the technical proficiency to do so

[CreativeForce]

I’m coming from Make where this was an option.
It’s called “Replay Broadcast” and explained this way “Used in conjunction with Thread message ID and indicates whether reply should be made visible to everyone in the channel or conversation.”

I have a lot of workflows involving Slack that I want to move over from Make to N8N. Being able to set a reply so it only posts in the thread, not also in the channel would be ideal.

[expozeur]

Yea, this seems to be a bug. Same issue. Where is n8n support?

[JoseRG]

it should be quite easy to fix, just get an option to set the reply_broadcast parameter to true or false…but I don’t know how to make them see this post…

[King_Samuel_David]

It likely more a feature, as a bug would be a feature that doesn’t work, if that makes sense. I’ve voted for this too

@JoseRG you can also attach ure workflow if u want by doing this,

just paste after clicking the code node, keeps formatting okay

[cobed95]

Stumbled upon this one recently. I dug around the source code and found out that you can achieve this by disabling the Reply to Thread toggle. The option name seems misleading.

[JoseRG]

sorry, that is wrong, that makes it reply just in the channel and not in the thread, what we want is that it replies in the thread but not in the channel

[cobed95]

What version of n8n are you on? On version 1.90.1 this works exactly as you want.

[cobed95]

You should still set the timestamp to reply to.
It’s just that you should disable the Reply to Thread toggle.
The help text also suggests so, although I missed it and ended up digging around the source code.

[JoseRG]

you are completely right, I just tried! life saver! thanks!

[mieubrisse]

I got confused by this as well, so I submitted a PR to clarify the option title: Clarify title for Slack node's reply_broadcast option by mieubrisse · Pull Request #17843 · n8n-io/n8n · GitHub