Question

How can I stop a Zap if Slack thread messages are present?

  • 20 April 2023
  • 5 replies
  • 90 views

What I am trying to accomplish is to allow my team to ask questions in slack and allow others to opt into answering the question. But if there is no message responses within 24 hours in the slack thread, I want the zap to tag a few select individuals in the thread to get eyes on the question. 

I have most of the zap built out and ready to use, but the part I am struggling on is how to only allow the zap to run IF there are no messages in the thread of the initial message. I’m assuming I will need to use something like “Filter by Zapier” to only allow it to move on if certain conditions are met, but I’m not sure what conditions to put in there. Or if there is another way. Any help is much appreciated!


This post has been closed for comments. Please create a new post if you need help or have a question about this topic.

5 replies

Userlevel 3
Badge +4

Hi @Masey 

Thanks for reaching out to the Community!

To ensure we’re on the same page, could you send screenshots of how you’ve configured the steps of the Zap so far? That’ll help me make sure I give you the best suggestion possible.

(If there’s any personal information, kindly blur them.)

Looking forward to your response!

Hi @Charie !

 

Here is the high level overview:

Step 2 is set up to only run if it is using my workflow titled “Start Swarm”
Steps 3, 4, and 5 are to ensure I get the right part of the text data to do step 6
Look up in spreadsheet to know who to tag in thread
This delay will be set for 24 hours, but I have it set for 1 minute for testing

 

This is where I run into issues, in step 8. I tried setting it as the screenshot below, but even if I comment in the slack thread, this doesn’t work (ie the message still sends in the thread) So I don’t think this works:

 

Step 9 seems to be working as expected because the correct people are being tagged in the thread. I just need the zap to not run after step 8 if people have already commented in the thread. Appreciate the help!

Userlevel 7
Badge +11

Hey @Masey, thanks for sharing those helpful screenshots with us!

I think what you might need to do here is after the Delay For action add a Find Message (Slack) action to search for the message that triggered the Zap. My thinking here is that when the message triggered the Zap there likely won’t be a thread created for it right away. So it would always pass the filter. 

But if you search for the message after 24 hours has passed then the filter can check the new information that is found by that Find Message action to see whether it has a thread now. 

Want to give that a try and let us know if that works as hoped?

@SamB Thanks for the follow up. I also tried that, but because the message is being posted as a bot from the slack workflow, Zap is unable to find the message using the “Find message in slack” action. Do you know of any way to format the query so it finds the message?

Userlevel 7
Badge +12

Hi @Masey 

Some users have had luck adding "from:appname" to the query to see if that brings the messages back. For example, if the message shows the app's name as "mo", add "from:mo".

Could you give that a try and see if it finds the message?