Slack Launches Its New Community Forum Platform

Slack has just announced the launch of its new community forum, a platform designed to give users a place to connect with others, find answers and ask questions, further setup to expand its community-led programs.

As announced, the Slack Community Forum is segmented into 10 high-level topics including Slack basics, Product UI/UX, Digital HQ, Workflow automation, Slack APIs, SDKs and developer tools, Change management, Slack Certified, Slack Community as well as Off-topic.

“The purpose of the forum isn’t to reduce support tickets or simply ask for feedback. Instead, it’s to give people a specific place to connect with others, find answers and ask questions about Slack,” said Elizabeth Kinsey, Head of community at Slack.

“When asking questions, users are provided with potential topics so they don’t have to think too long about what to ask. That’s one of the things I like about Salesforce Experience Cloud, which is what we built this on: It adjusts topics. It uses language processing to identify, for example, that a question should be tagged as ‘Slack APIs’ because it includes the words ‘bolt’ and ‘channel’.”

Slack stated that it has created a number of community-led programs through the years including a dedicated workspace, community chapters around the globe as well as certifications, while this new platform is built similar its ‘Stack Exchange’ sites – to foster ways to embrace and improve what they offered as well as help users customize Slack to their needs.

“Yes! It is that Stack Exchange model, similar to Salesforce’s IdeaExchange or any old-school technical web forum. The thing that works well for Stack Exchange is you are not just contributing, you also get some sense of satisfaction and reward by reading and participating. Plus, you get reputation points when helping out. And by extension, you gain credibility when you’re seen as an expert in your domain,” continued Elizabeth Kinsey.

Slack is also launching a new Slack forum app built to bring their community forum into any Slack workspace. Once installed, users can search the entire community forum through the app and get results back on the app’s home screen as well as send reply directly from there.