People, access, and being told
Posting to Slack
Connect a project to a Slack channel and its news appears there — one calm line per change, a burst as one message.
If your team lives in Slack, a project can post its news into one channel of your choice: a task put on someone, a note written, work coming due. One line per event, the task reference as a link, and a burst of changes to one task as one message — the same restraint as the emails, in a room instead of an inbox.
Who is told what inside sjTasks does not change at all. The channel is an extra window on the project, not a replacement for notifications, and connecting one is an admin's call — the controls live on the project's Integrations page, which only admins see.
Connecting a channel
sjTasks posts through a Slack incoming webhook — an address Slack gives you that accepts messages for one channel. Making one takes about two minutes:
- Go to api.slack.com/apps and choose Create New App, then From scratch. Name it anything you like — "sjTasks" reads well in the channel — and pick your Slack team.
- In the app's settings, open Incoming Webhooks and switch Activate Incoming Webhooks on.
- Click Add New Webhook to Team and pick the channel the project should post to. A channel per project works best — a busy project in a shared channel drowns it.
- Copy the Webhook URL. It starts with
https://hooks.slack.com/services/— treat it like a password, because anyone holding it can post to that channel. - In sjTasks, open the project, click Integrations, paste the address, and Connect. Then Send a test message and watch it land.
We store the address encrypted, and the page never shows it back in full — just enough of the tail to recognise which webhook it is.
What gets posted
Out of the box the channel hears about the same things sjTasks emails people about by default: a task assigned, work due soon, a note written, someone added to the project. Checkboxes on the Integrations page let you widen or narrow that — every event from notifications that makes sense in a room is there to choose. The two summaries stay email-only, and a mention is not its own line — the note that carries it is posted anyway.
Each message is one plain line: who did what, the task reference as a link, the title after it. A note is quoted underneath — the first few hundred characters, with the link holding the rest. Someone working through a task produces one message listing each change, not a message per change. Nothing bold, no icons, no unfurled previews.
If it stops
When a webhook is deleted in Slack, or its channel goes away, our posts start failing. After ten failures in a row sjTasks switches the channel off — rather than knocking on a dead door forever — and emails the admin who connected it, once. Nothing inside sjTasks is affected. Reconnecting is step 5 again: paste a fresh address, Save, test.
Disconnect on the same page removes the connection and forgets the webhook entirely.
Replies come later
Today the channel is a window, not a door: sjTasks posts into Slack, and nothing comes back. Replying in the thread does not add a note to the task — that needs a different kind of connection to Slack, and it is on our list. For now, the link in every message puts the task one click away, and replying to a notification email already works.