Creating, Managing and Archiving Slack Channels

This page is part of 🧰The Toolbox by Danny Smith.

Ideally, everyone in an organisation should be able to create and archive slack channels as they see fit. Limiting this to just admins or IT staff creates far too much friction and sends the message that slack is owned by the It folks. Keeping our communication tools working well should be everyone’s job.

However, unless you want a chaotic free-for-all with duplicate channels and random channel names, you should have some rules and conventions about how to create, manage and archive channels.

Creating a channel

Creating a Slack channel is quick an easy. Before creating a new channel…

1. Ask yourself if you need a new channel at all – If you only need a brief one-off conversation consider using a group DM instead.
2. Check that one with the same/similar purpose doesn’t already exist.
3. Now ask yourself what this channel is for.
• What’s the most appropriate prefix? Slack Channel Prefixes
• How will you describe the its purpose?
• Who is the channel for?
• How do you expect it to be used? Does it need any special rules about how to use it?

Having done that, create the channel and make sure you:

• Give it a descriptive, short name which immediately tells others what it’s for (and a prefix if appropriate). Use all lowercase letters and use hyphens not underscores as a separator.
• Give it a clear description. Channel descriptions provide information about a channel’s intended use. This helps slack admins to keep things organised, but more importantly it provides context to other folks about whether they need to join it.

• Set the topic so its the same as the description (or a more succinct version). This makes it visible in the channel header. The topic is also a good place to put any rules about how the channel should be used.

• Invite the groups and users you want in the channel.
• Send a first post to the channel explaining why you have created it and tagging anyone who needs notifying.
• If it’s a general interest channel, consider posting in #core-general or some other appropriate place to let others know that they can join it if thew want.

Adding Bookmarks and Pinned Messages

You can add any useful URLs to the top of the channel. These often point to resources the team regularly needs access to. In addition to more permanent resources like this, you can pin posts to the channel and they’ll appear at the top alongside the bookmarks.

Pinned messages should be unpinned after they’re no longer relevant.

Managing a channel

Everyone is responsible for keeping slack channels clean and tidy – we all need to be gardeners. Encourage people to…

• Keep the conversation relevant to the channel. Direct people to more appropriate places if needed.
• Invite other people to channels as and when needed. Don't be a gatekeeper.
• Think hard before adding a bot or integration to a non bot- channel. They can be very noisy.
• Do a regular cleanup of your pinned messages and bookmarks.

• If a channel’s purpose changes over time, be sure to update the name and description. For example, it’s fairly common for temp channels to become projects, and for project channels to become teams.

Archiving a channel