I’ve been working on and finally completed some really cool Zaps to support an online MMO game where our team uses Slack as our primary communications hub. I’m purchasing the Starter plan, which is plenty enough.
After I got everything set up and working perfectly, other members of my team said that they could not access the “Push to Zapier” function (which is key to my Zaps).
Do I actually need to buy the “Team” plan at ~$300 a month just for other Slack members to use the Zaps I created? They don’t need to have any access to Zapier at all -- just the access to the Push system.
Are my teammates just doing something wrong, or do I actually need a team plan?
Thanks!
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Hi @Jejune You need to have a Zapier account to use the Push by Zapier chrome extension, so if you wanted everyone to have the button then you would need a team account.
Let’s see if we can’t find a better way to do this though :)
How comfortable are you with webhooks? You could set up a Slash command in Slack and have it send the information to Zapier in a webhook. In Zapier, you use the catchhook trigger to get the information and then run the actions in the Zap. The result of that would be that folks could type a slash command in Slack (eg /MMO) instead of using the Push by Zapier button.
Here’s Slack’s guide on Slash Commands to get your started there: Slash Commands
An example of how you can use this in slack is a wonderful ‘Leslie Knope Complement bot’ that one of our brilliant Customer Champions set up.
The Slash Command set up in Slack looks a like this:
And there’s a Zap that picks up the webhook and does some magic before sending a message back to Slack. I got permission to share that Zap so that you can see what it looks like, here it is!
So whenever someone types the command /knope @username in a public Slack channel, this happens:
I hope that helps! Let me know if you have any questions
@Danvers -- thank you so much! I am not currently comfortable with web hooks, but I recently worked through a tutorial from this guy on making a slash command, and successfully did it. I am going to follow the tutorial above and see if I can absorb enough knowledge from it and my previous experiments to replace the Push to Zapier Slack function with slash commands. Will let you know how it goes. Thanks again!
@Danvers -- I got the web hook to work with the slash command! The only thing I cannot find documentation on is how to format things so that the user can input data and that it goes where I want it to. The system is for submitting scout reports from the game into a spreadsheet that can later be easily retrieved. I want to build a massive repository of these reports.
Ideally, the user would input:
/report a URL], a date], their name], the report]
. . . and all of that would input into a new row in the spreadsheet, with each element in its own respective column.
The complementary slash command will search for a report based on the URL (the URL is the location of a town). So, that will go:
/retrieve eURL]
. . . and it will spit out the most recent report for that URL.
I’ve already rigged both of these up via the Zapier push. I just need to tweak to use the slash commands.
Do you know of any documentation on how and what to format so that I can better form the /report command?
Thanks so much!
Awesome, nice working setting up those slash commands!
Anything that’s typed after the command is sent to the webhook in a field called ‘text’. So what I would do here is ask them to type all the info, with each pieces separated by a specific character (eg comma, pipe, or anything that wont be in their name/report). Then you can use the Formatter app to split the text according to that character and plug it into your spreadsheet.
So the Zap would look like this:
Trigger: webhook
Action: Formatter - Split text
Action: Create new row in spreadsheet
In the Formatter step, for the ‘Segment index’ field, select the option to return all parts of the text as separate fields, that will allow you to plug each piece into the respective column in Google sheets.
Out of curiosity, could I ask what game y’all are playing?
Thanks! It’s a great game called Illyriad. It has been around for ten years, and I’ve been playing since 2011. The game is an MMO strategy game and is incredibly sophisticated -- particularly the military aspect (which is my focus).
For many years, I played in a group called SIN who was the most advanced military alliance I the game. In addition to our mastery of the in-game mechanics, we had folks in the group who were programmers. They were able to wield the game’s data feeds as well as our groups’ individual player data feeds to build all kinds of Slack integrations that made us even more formidable. I’ve returned recently and started a new group (an elf-only group simply called “Elves”), but I’ve lost those tech folks that could build those tools. Thus, I am muscling through it myself. ;-)
I have a long laundry list of tech solutions I want to build/do. This is why I’m trying to get my chops down.
As for this project, you are really helping me out, and I greatly appreciate it! Feel free to check out the game and see if it’s something you’d be interested in playing, we’d love to have you in!
Kind Regards,
JJ
@Jejune That sounds like a lot of fun - I wish I had more time for games right now!
If you need any other help, let us know! The Slack triggers/actions are really comprehensive so hopefully you’ll be able to do most of what you need
@Danvers -- just wanted to thank you again. Everything worked like a charm. This opens up so many possibilities!
There are no data feeds for scouting cities in the game -- you just get this ugly text in an IGM that looks something like this:
Sent By: System
Received By: Jejune nELVES]
Date: 19 May 2020 00:47
Operation From: Malek Jejune nELVES]
Operation Against: Darth B at a358|-1819] in High Hills Darth Tardigrade dYARR!]
Operation Type: Scout
Operation Outcome: Completely Successful!
Mission Report: Your diplomatic mission was undetected and completed the objective! Your units are on their way home, safe and sound.
Information Gathered: Troop levels present, belonging to player:
Type: Unit: Quantity: Troops:
Charioteers Charioteers 431
What my solution does is allows the player in Slack to paste in this report with the URL of the city at the top of it. It dumps into this Google Sheet, which is almost like my own little database. To retrieve reports, all players have to do is slash command /lookup and put the URL of the city in question, and it will find the most recent report and pull the report. It’s probably pretty ugly, but efficient.
The only weird thing that I can’t figure out is that when I run the slash commands, I get this ugly response in the Slack channel:
That response is the what the webhook trigger sends as an ‘OK, I received your webhook’ message (a 200 response). You should be able to fix this by enabling silent mode in the Webhook trigger.
You can see that check box in the ‘Customize’ section of the Zap:
Make sure you turn off the Zap while you make the change and try re-testing the trigger (by sending a command while the Zap is looking for new trigger data) and then turn the Zap back on. That should work but if it doesn’t let me know!
@Danvers -- thanks! I thought that might be the setting to fix it, and I changed it before but hadn’t re-tested. All good now!
