Slack: Disable previews

Created on 23 May 2018 · 4Comments · Source: integrations/slack

Hi there,

A few days ago I enabled GitHub previews for pull requests I linked into slack. I now find that the preview feature is adding more noise than anything else, but I don't see how to disable them.

Source

dgellow

Most helpful comment

You can disable automatic previews in /github settings

Thank you, I was able to disable previews with your command :)

@dgellow @wilhelmklopp

How? I just see You do not have any settings configured.

Edit: nevermind https://github.com/integrations/slack/issues/487#issuecomment-598238044

thisismydesign on 12 Mar 2020

👍2

All 4 comments

👋 @dgellow

You can disable automatic previews in /github settings

Also curious about the noise -- that's something we think about a lot. Were there any unfurls that you thought were particularly noisy? Anything you think can be done to reduce the noisiness?

Thanks for the feedback!

wilhelmklopp on 23 May 2018

👍1

Hey @wilhelmklopp,

Thank you, I was able to disable previews with your command :)
I checked commands available with /github before opening this issue, but somehow missed it.

If I may, I would suggest to show settings in the Slack tooltip, which currently look like this:
screen shot 2018-05-23 at 15 39 53

To respond to your question:

Also curious about the noise -- that's something we think about a lot. Were there any unfurls that you thought were particularly noisy? Anything you think can be done to reduce the noisiness?

First time I encounter the word "unfurl", I'm that happy I don't have to guess how to pronounce it 🙃.

Ok, so a bit more context and details. I mostly share links to pull requests with my engineers coworkers to make them aware that something is up for reviews, or that I'm done with a review and the pull request is ready to be merged. My coworkers are in general aware of the tasks I'm working on, and I'm aware of theirs. In this context, the description of a pull request is in general for documentation purpose, to give an overview of the work done, and ease the review process of the diff of the code by giving a general overview.

Some actual examples:

< pictures redacted following complaints >

As you can see, it's mostly about pointing someone to the place where they have the full context of the changes (description, list of commits, diff). If I consider that some context is necessary when sharing the link, for example if I don't expect them to know what I was working on, it's quick to add something short and to the point.

With automatic previews, the result I got is this one. I'm sharing a screenshot of my entire screen here so you can see how much screen space is allocated to github previews:

< pictures redacted following complaints >

And that's cases with very short description, it could be even worse.

In a way, the current previews are too noisy if the goal is to give some context, and not noisy enough if the goal is to let others do some work without switching context (i.e: switch from slack to github everytime) given that they will have to open the pull request to see the diff and list of commits (which is really the things that matters IMHO, even if the description is important).

Conclusion: Interesting idea, but I'm happier now that they are disabled :)

dgellow on 23 May 2018

👍2