There are ways to implement integrations between Vanilla and Slack, HOWEVER, a lot of the easiest ways assume that your forum is publicly accessible such as API calls or RSS feeds.
This method relies on email notifications, so you will have to choose what notifications you want to receive (and that will ultimately go to Slack).
Note: these instructions are geared for Gmail/Google Suite, but the process would be similar for any other provider, may just require a quick google search :)
Choose the user whose notifications this will be based on
This can be a real user, or a user created just for this purpose. What will be important is that;
- This user has access to all content in the forum they need to be notified for
- This user has a real email that you can access forwarding settings for
- This users role has the ‘advanced notifications’ permission
Once this is done, enable the chosen user’s notification settings as desired.
Set up Email Forwarding to Slack
First you’ll need to generate a forwarding address for slack
If you need to forward to a specific channel in Slack, review this guide
Next, you’ll have to set it up as an address you are allowed to forward to in Gmail (I promise it's not that hard!)
TLDR: If you use Google Suite for your emails, you can simply follow these steps:
- Go to “Forwarding”
- Click “Add a forwarding address”
- Click on the link that gets sent to slack,
- You're off to the races!
Create a Filter to select the messages you want
Go to your email settings and have gmail forward a copy of all PMs automatically to that Slack forwarding address:
- Go to your gmail settings, then go to 'filters and blocked addresses'
- Select 'create a new filter'
- You can select all emails coming from your forum notifications outgoing email address, or you can select keyphrases.
- For example, if you only care about private messages, or wanted to filter those to a particular channel, you could use the phrase ‘sent you a message’ to distinguish these.
PROTIP: In that popup, be sure to click 'create filter' and not search (this is where I
make a mistake every.single.time.).
Note that this will be greyed out if you did not complete step 2 as gmail will only forward to addresses that have been authenticated.
PROTIP: You could also choose to archive it at the same time, if you don't want it in your emails all the time + see it on slack. Dealers' choice.
- Hit 'create filter' , and you're done!
