Quick Slack Guide
First of all welcome to our Pinax project Slack team! We’re glad you made it! 🎉 And if you haven’t joined our Slack team yet, we invite you to do so. 😊 The purpose of our Slack team is to engage and connect with the Pinax community, answer your questions regarding the Pinax project, discuss Pinax related topics, and provide help for any other programming issues or questions you may have.
Let’s dive into Slack!
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When you first join our Slack team you will notice that we automatically subscribed you to the
#general,#random,#community,#help, and#pinaxchannels. If you don’t want to be subscribed to any of these channels or you’d like to mute one of those, please click on the little wheel in the top bar of the channel you would like to leave/mute and choose your preferred option. We currently have 78 channels total. If you click onCHANNELSin the sidebar, you can see a full list of channels including a short description for each channel explaining what its purpose is. We have a dedicated channel for each Pinax app and starter project, as well as a few other channels. Please feel free to join those you are interested in. If after a while you realize you’d like to leave or mute the channel, you can do so anytime. -
To update your profile and account information (for example change your name, add or remove a profile picture, etc.) or your Slack preferences (like notification settings, and the side bar design) please click on
Pinax Projecton top of the sidebar and then either chooseProfile & accountorPreferences. You can also see theSet yourself awayoption there. This means that Slack will show everyone that you are offline but in fact you are online and can read everything that’s going on without being disturbed. Slack will automatically put your account inDo Not Disturbmode (you will see a littleznext to your user name) from 10pm to 8am your time. You can change this time range in the settings or turn off theDo Not Disturbmode completely. All functions are accessible to you even inDo Not Disturbmode. Slack just does this to indicate to other users that it’s probably late enough in your time zone that you might be sleeping or not on your computer anymore. -
If you have a question or message for someone specific and you want them to be notified about it, it’s a good idea to
@-mentionthem. You can do this by typing in@followed by the person’s user name. If the person is not online at the moment, they will be notified by Slack via email (unless they disabled the function in their settings) or should see that you mentioned them next time they log into Slack. For a full list of Pinax project Slack team users, check out theDIRECT MESSAGESsection on the bottom of the side bar. If there’s something you feel needs to be discussed in private with another Pinax project Slack team member, please feel free to direct message them. If it’s something you think everyone would benefit from, we ask that you please discuss the topic in a public channel. If someone prefers not to chat via direct message, we also ask that you respect their wishes. Please note that by joining our Slack channel you agree to follow our Code of Conduct. If you would like to notify all users of something, please post your message in thegeneralchannel and start your message with@channel. This will ensure that everyone is notified about your message. Please only use this feature when you have important announcements to make that you think everyone should read. -
If you ask a question and no one responds right away, please don’t get upset. It’s not that we don’t want to help you. Sometimes we’re just busy, have signed off for the day, or didn’t see your question. The Slack team is usually pretty active during business hours during the week but it’s pretty quiet most evenings and weekends. If you don’t get help or an answer right away, please bear with us, or try pinging us again.
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If you make a mistake in one of your messages, click on your message and you will see three symbols pop up in the top right corner above your message. Click on the three little dots and you will see the option
Edit message. You can also mark a message as read, delete a message, tell Slack to remind you about a message, or add an emoji reaction. -
If you want to paste code in Slack, it is useful to use Slack’s code snippet feature. For detailed guidelines, please click here.
Slack has really good documentation and a really good help center. Chances are that if you need help with anything, you will be able to find your answer by checking out the help center. Should you still have questions or need help with something Slack related, please ping @anna, our Pinax project community manager, and she will help you as soon as possible.
Thank you again for joining our Slack team and we look forward to chatting with you! 😊