Finding a workaround for Discord's forum post thread requirement in Zapier

Hello ​@lamatekinc 
You’ve hit a current Slack limitation in Zapier.

Slack triggers that work with forum style channels usually require selecting a specific thread. There isn’t a native “find thread” action or a way to monitor all threads in a forum channel for reactions or mentions.

Best workaround:

Use the New Message Posted to Channel trigger for the forum channel and then add a Filter step to look for the specific emoji text, keyword, or @mention. That lets you monitor replies across threads without selecting each one individually. Just test it, since forum channels can behave slightly differently.

If you share whether you’re looking for a reaction, keyword, or mention, I can suggest the cleanest setup.

Dr. Tanvi Sachar
Monday Certified Partner, Tuesday Wizard

Thank you for your reply, Dr. Tanvi. I thought would be the best way as well and would have been fine since I want to monitor that whole channel, but unfortunately only text channels are available in that trigger. Unless it is possible to use the forum channel’s id as a custom value. 

Hi there ​@lamatekinc 👋

There’s a New Forum Post trigger available that would allow you to trigger a post whenever a new message is created. It has a Forum Channel setting where you can select a specific channel for the Zap to watch but, if you leave that blank it would allow the Zap to watch all channels for new posts. From there, like drtanvisachar you could use a filter to check whether the message contains a certain emoji or user @ mention. 

But if it’s only specific threads that are created by a Zap that you want it to trigger on, you could have your existing Zap that creates the new post also keep a record of it somewhere else, like in Zapier Tables for example. Then, when the second Zap triggers for new forum posts you could use a Find Records (Zapier Tables) search action to look up whether the post is one of the post threads stored in the table. Then you’d have a filter check only allow the Zap to continue if an existing record was found, and run any necessary actions after that as needed.

Do you think that sort of approach could would?

Hi ​@SamB  thank you for the response. Unfortunately, that trigger won’t work for me, because that only polls on new forum posts rather than messages in any of the posts. Here’s what I’m trying to do:

Someone will fill out a New kitten adoption application from Jotform where they put the name of the kitten they want to adopt. 

I am creating the initial Discord Forum post with the submission information. In this same zap I am searching our database to see if I can match the name and since I have the thread id in that zap I can subsequently make a new message in that thread/post with information from the db about the cat for the adoption coordinator to use. 

But often the submission for the adoption app has a misspelled name, wrong cat, etc. so I was hoping to have the adoption coordinator be able to send a specific trigger message like “Info for Cat <cat name>” in any of the forum posts where I could then grab the id of the forum post and post in that thread with the information on demand. 

It seems like a limitation of the discord api that I might not be able to overcome, but I do thank you guys for your suggestions. 

Ah, I see! Thanks for clarifying that ​@lamatekinc. And thank you so much for sharing that you solved it using a Discord bot and Webhooks for the trigger! 🤗 Seems like you’re all set for now but if there’s anything else we can help with, just let us know. 

In the meantime, happy Zapping! ⚡