Getting Started with Slack

I have now sent out invitations for all of you to join our ENG 7006 Slack team. Slack is pretty self-explanatory, especially if you do some poking around and watch the getting started tutorial. But I want to make sure you notice a few things:

• You must subscribe to whatever channels you’d like to see. This lets you be in control of which conversations you participate in, which is nice. But, by default, users are only subscribed to #general and #random. In addition to those two, I have created a few others: #announce, #reading, #lab, and so on. They’re pretty self-explanatory, and they have descriptions. Subscribe to whichever, but at minimum, you’ll want to subscribe to #announce, and #reading, since that’s where required material will go. tl;dr: Subscribe, at minimum, to both #announce and #reading.
• How to subscribe to a channel. In the left-hand pane, there’s a list of channels. Simply click on the word “CHANNELS” at the top of the list, and you’ll get a list of all the channels in our team. Click on the channel you’d like to join. This will take you to a “preview” of the channel, where you can see its contents. You’re not yet joined, however. Click on the “Join Channel” button at the bottom of the window. Now you’re all joined up! tl;dr: To join a channel, click on CHANNELS > [channel name] > Join Channel button.
• You can post everywhere in the Slack team site, but all users (me and all fellow students) will see what you post. Please don’t abuse this privilege. If you’d like to post random, interesting, or humorous things, that’s what #random is for. If you’d like to have a conversation with a subset of your peers, please create a private channel, and invite them. Or, if you want to have a private conversation with one other member, you can direct-message them. tl;dr: Don’t abuse your posting powers: #random, private channels, and direct messages are your friends.
• Readings live in #reading. Sadly, the Google Calendar doesn’t automatically linkify URLs in the event descriptions. From now on, please just consult the #reading channel for course readings not in required books. tl;dr: Find readings in #reading.
• Slack is searchable. This will make life happy for you. Please note that files are also searchable, where they have text: scanned PDFs won’t be searchable, but PDFs from journals should be. This is a Good Thing!
• You should also set your notification levels. This is again, largely up to you. You can set your notification levels to a pretty high resolution. Some of these can be set per team. Just click on the team name (“eng7006”) at the top left, and select “Preferences.” Here you can set some of your notification settings. But for further control, you select “View Profile & Account.” In the right hand pane, that will bring up your profile and account. If you edit your profile by clicking on the “Edit” button, that lets you set your name, your picture, write some information about yourself, etc. Do that if you’d like. If you click on “Account” button, that will let you change account settings. Under the “Notifications” tab, you’ll first be met by a prompt to switch to their recommended settings; I also recommend you do this. Click the button. I also recommend: under “Channel Specific Settings,” adding settings for the #announce channel so that everything is forwarded to you. Otherwise, set your settings however you like.

I think that’s all! But if you’re having difficulty with Slack, the place to start asking about it is in the #tech channel.