Feature request: mute comments from bots

[swrobel]

We have pull request comment notifications turned on for our Slack integration. Is it possible to mute comments by bots or specific bot accounts? We really just want comments from developers to go into slack. Here's an example of a comment we get from the Codecov bot on every pull request (I'd rather not turn these comments off, as they're useful, we just don't want them getting pushed thru to slack).

[bkeepers]

Thanks for the feedback @swrobel. It's not currently possible to mute activity from bots or a specific user.

[esterkjuicepress]

This really needs to happen! Bots are great, but I don't need to see every single googledrive doc that gets shared with me pop up in my notifications :\

[me-cedric]

any news on this is this coming soon?

[jeremypiednoel]

is this going to happen anytime soon? Github bot is such a flood ^^

[rorykoehler]

Another vote for this. Making app bots unusable for us. This has been an open acknowledged request for at least 3-4 years now.

[josepw]

please do this i hate muting the whole channel.

[dennyjovic]

My team would also love to have this. Make this happen please.

[aguycalledjoe]

Same here. Would love to have this feature available. Too much noise from bots. 😭

[natharateh]

This would be a great improvement! 👍

[dlopuch]

A different (possibly simpler) take on this: let bots post without notifying the channel (ie mute decision is a bot/post setting rather than a per-user setting).

Hipchat has this option and it greatly reduces the amount of noise.

I don't need my attention taken away every time there's a routine bot action... that doesn't encourage work being done in slack, that makes me want to turn slack off.

[tomasfejfar]

A workaround for this is to give the bot its own channel to post to. Not a great workaround, but still.

[johntotten]

any update on this? some of the Bot responses are driving people ::bananas emoji::

[dennissivia]

Hey everybody 👋 ,

In order to understand this feature request a little bit better, I have a question to everybody who wants this feature:

Question

Is it sufficient to mute all bot interactions for that specific channel? This will be way easier, than only a specific bot.

Voting

I encourage everybody to always vote on the OP. This makes it easier for us to see the existing demand. If the 👍 etc are spread across the entire thread, it is likely that we underestimate the number of people supporting the idea.

[jotaf98]

Is it sufficient to mute all bot interactions for that specific channel?

Given the use cases mentioned in the relevant Twitter thread, I think this would satisfy most (if not all) people who complained.

Even if someone is looking forward to a more fine-grained solution, this feature would still make a huge difference.

One question: does this extend to DMs by bots? Some very chatty bots DM me and I'd like to turn off those as well. I was surprised to see that I can't mute them, or users for that matter.

[stansult]

Is it sufficient to mute all bot interactions for that specific channel? This will be way easier, than only a specific bot.

Yes, that in itself (mute notifications for all bot messages) would be a great feature

[ccrothers]

Can we please get an ETA on this feature? Bot notifications are a significant deterant from participating in workspaces that use them.

https://github.com/integrations/slack/issues/720 (previously linked) would be sufficient, so an ETA on that would also be acceptable.

[MalikKillian]

This is becoming more of an annoyance every day. Apps get added to my workspace (out of my control) and I'm getting essentially harassed by bots for services I don't even want to use.

I would be fine with muting bots globally or muting a specific bot. I'm getting direct messages from bots so muting a channel doesn't help.

[cigrainger]

I really want to be able to enable comments in our channel. But bots make that impossible because it just spams our channels. It's really debilitating for our use of the integration.

[joshwolfer]

Bots spam our channels relentlessly with information that has no relevance to me, IE: I'm in a channel with access to developers, but I'm not a developer, so I don't need to see things like code check-ins.

Please add basic functionality to mute bots. This should be trivial.

[JamesDBartlett3]

Is it sufficient to mute all bot interactions for that specific channel?

That would be a great start.

As a corollary to the "mute all bots" setting, would it be possible to also allow users to opt-in to receive notifications on a per-bot basis by adding the bot's name to their keywords in the Preferences dialog? And if that's possible, could the per-bot keyword be extended to include the name of the channel? For example, if a user wanted to receive bot notifications ONLY from the Dropbox bot, ONLY in the #general channel, they could enable the "mute all bots" setting, then add "#general%Dropbox" to their keywords.

Thanks, and keep up the great work, Slack team!

[srvrdhn]

How is this not a thing yet?

[GeneGeek]

@dennissivia Yes, please!

Is it sufficient to mute all bot interactions for that specific channel? This will be way easier, than only a specific bot.

Slack changed my life. But after 4 years, we added the Github bot and Slack has become unusable for me. To clarify your post above, the bot does not post to a channel. I'd like to mute the conversation that happens outside of a channel.

/mute [Slackbot] I’m very sorry! It’s not possible to mute conversations with bots.

[Djohnson-at-TR]

I will 42nd this request. We use the bot from ChurnZero with an app in Slack and it is disruptive and inefficient. Not having the option to mute notifications is ridiculous. And like others, I had to disable it completely which means your functionality is less than desirable. For others, I encourage you to leave this kind of feedback and your frustration on a site like TrustRadius or G2. If enough say something, it is hard for Slack to ignore the request because it impacts how they look to prospective buyers.

[joshwolfer]

My concentration is still broken regularly because of this non-sense. I have to keep an eye on what's going on in the 20 slack channels I'm part of, but these bot updates spam me all day. So I either have to ignore everything or constantly interrupt my concentration, destroying my productivity. Yay technology.

[matt-fagan]

We're almost at this feature request's 2 year birthday! What are you guys getting for the party?

Adding my name to this petition. I imagine the dependencies nested in the auto-pinging functionality of bot notifications must be a thornbush. But I assure you, if you just add the jira_integration bot to the product manager that has this request on their backlog, this will be fixed in a day.

[apredmore-tag]

The Google Calendar app is driving me crazy. I reduced the types of notifications it sends me, but I would rather get most of those and just not get notified every single time an event is created or changed. At this point, I may just have to remove the app, which is unfortunate.

[Frikster]

As an outlet to everyone while we continue to wait, you may thumbs down this comment to vent your frustration at seeing the above message.

[deeeeekun]

+1

[SalomeHussein]

I can't believe this thread is two years old, and I literally signed in just to thumbs down Frikster's comment. It's still alive and well. It's probably because everyone is using Gcal to schedule telecons now and the notifications are the worst.

[furtive]

OMG, I've spent a whole week trying to figure out how to mute our Confluence bot. For the love of all that is great allow users to mute bots!

[jonburdo-gravyty]

Providing no way to mute bots is ridiculous. Why in the world would you make anything in slack unable to be muted?!!

[mmontag]

+💯

Slack needs to provide more client-side control over the appearance & behavior of bot messages.

[Heneman]

You can tell the necessity of, and the complete disregard in considering, a feature by threads like this

[joshwolfer]

I've given up on this. It's clear that my concentration is going to be held hostage by Slack. Either that or I just completely ignore it for long periods of time. It's a shame, but Slack clearly doesn't care about this.

[jonburdo-gravyty]

@dennissivia Any updates on this?

[jpatricknola]

I want this feature also. The slack channel is so noisy from bot activity that to me the github integration is almost worthless

[raulvc]

welp looks like its been awhile https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/620278685153820672

[mikecomer]

Fully agree! It would be fantastic to mute these. Slack is very unusable as-long as there are so many unnecessary notifications. It's just noise, and I end up closing slack to get some peace and quiet.

[apredmore-tag]

What a coincidence, I was just complaining to my wife about the Gooogle Calendar interrupting me every single morning, just when I am settling in.

On Mon, Apr 20, 2020 at 4:02 PM mikecomer notifications@github.com wrote:

Fully agree! It would be fantastic to mute these. Slack is very unusable as-long as there are so many unnecessary notifications. It's just noise, and I end up closing slack to get some peace and quiet.

— You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/integrations/slack/issues/544#issuecomment-616778109, or unsubscribe https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ALOW6XFGIFBZHS2LDBVYCULRNSS57ANCNFSM4E3LQGQA .

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[spavell]

It's really assentail to be able to mute bots. Some apps are making so much noise of nothing and I cannot do anything about it!!! Totally unacceptable :(((

[tom-cf]

+1. I've been forced to disconnect the Jira app because I can't mute its notifications.

[joshwolfer]

Well that's cool. Looks like a major Slack update pushed out today. And I still can't mute bots. But thanks for giving me the important stuff, like moving the corporate directory from the right side menu to the left bar. Super impor...... oh sorry. My concentration was just broken by Slack bot spam in the middle of typing that last sentence.

[mmontag]

The problem with bots is not just the interruptions, but that they flood the channel with massive text walls. For example, Github bots that scroll the entire screen away the moment you paste a PR link into a channel. It reminds me of kids flooding chat rooms with ASCII art. We need some way to reduce these visual interruptions.

Some messages can be partially expanded/collapsed. I'm asking for the option to display all bot messages initially collapsed to 1 line.

[keego]

My ask here would be simply to have DMs from bots still show as unread, but not up the badge counter on my slack app icon.

I ALWAYS have unreads and strategically check unread channels when I have time. I use the badge icon count as an indication that I may have a more urgent thing to respond to.

Having the badge counter increment whenever the Outlook bot shows my schedule for the day or whenever the JIRA bot says someone updated some bug from Todo to InProgress adds a lot of noise and dilutes my sense of urgency. The only alternative here is to completely remove these bots, which are still providing useful info, just in the wrong way.

Curious if there could be a simple client side setting for this, but I'm not intimately familiar with Slack's notification infrastructure so idk.

[mjamei]

It is very frustrating to see slack prioritize so many new bells and whistles on every release, but a relatively simple quality of life feature like this does not get attention. I check Slack many times every day just to see that it was a GitHub bot saying a new PR is created or someone mentioned me on a doc somewhere. It is ridiculous.

[smundro]

How the flip is this not already a thing? Notifications are completely useless due to bot messaging overload, so the choice is either bots or notifications, there's no way to have both.

[wookiee]

Idea: Make it a paid DLC! I bet almost everyone in this thread would pay cash for this feature right now.

[jjfmarket]

Commenting to vote on this issue

[f-gonzalez]

I would also love to see this feature. I don't want to mute an entire channel just because a bot interrupts me all the time, losing my concentration

[JMBurley]

Adding my voice to the chorus of requests.