Slack Channel Prefixes

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

Even in small organisations, the list of slack channels can get overwhelming pretty quickly. Channel naming conventions help with this, and also help people to understand the purpose of each channel at a glance. The conventions below are rooted in the following four principles…

1. A channel's name should clearly communicate the channel’s purpose.
2. Keep it simple, obvious and consistent.
3. Standardised, descriptive prefixes make it easier to mentally group, filter and search through channels.

Categories of channel

These categories of channel are specifically intended for certain types of communication. Some of them have quite rigid rules about who can create them, who should be in them and who should Use a prefix for each category so they’re easy to find and organise.

Prefix	Purpose	Examples
core-<channel>	Core channels which everyone must be in. See Core Channels in Slack for more on these.	core-general core-shoutouts core-random
team-<temname>	Each formally established team gets it’s own channel for team members. The convention is that the second part of the name matches the established team name, as used elsewhere. Folks can be in multiple teams and teams can be subsets of other teams. Others can “drop in” as needed. These should mostly be public, but some (like team-leadership or team-peopleops might need to be private). See 👨‍👩‍👦‍👦Formally Established Teams for more.	team-design team-leadership team-XYZproject
temp-<anything>	For extremely short-lived channels, the temp- prefix can be used. Use these for short-term collaboration or discussions.	temp-acme-clientbriefing temp-newctohire
project-<id>	Project-specific channel. One for each “open” project. These should be archived by the project owner when the project is over.	project-rebrand project-q1okrs
bot-<toolname>	All channels that are purely 🤖 feeds from other tools.	bot-github bot-bamboohr bot-asana
help-<subject>	For asking questions about specific, generic topic areas.	help-tech help-slack help-notion
ask-<teamname>	Channels specifically for asking questions and making requests of other teams. This avoids their team channels being overwhelmed. The second part should match the team that monitors the channel. See Ask Channels in Slack.	ask-tech ask-design ask-finance
crew-<location>	Location-specific channels for folks who live in a certain place to chat about local stuff.	crew-london crew-uk crew-bayarea
shared-<topic>	Channels made solely for conversations with external participants. This is usually done through Slack connect.
guild-<group>	Team members who are passionate about a topic can form a Guild, which essentially is a community of interest about a (usually) work-related topic. Guilds should be formally established and have an owner.	guild-managers guild-performanceengineering

Unprefixed channels

All other channels are unprefixed, and folks are free to create, join, leave or archive them as they feel necessary. Some of these will be for work topics and discussions, some of them will be for socials discussions. Here are some examples…