Best answer

Slack Channel Not Found - Request to send multi-user DMs

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
June 26, 2020
6 replies
801 views

kheiron
Beginner
1 reply

Hey, I’ve set up a zap from airtable to slack. People can tag users on a form and it sends them a slack DM to let them know. But I’m getting intermittent errors and I’m struggling to troubleshoot the problem.

I get the message “channnel_not_found” when trying to send some message. I have the zap pointing to a field containing the UserID number rather than screen name. I have tried doing it as a plain text:

UC9FHFWH4

or with the brackets as suggested in some support articles
<@UC9FHFWH4>
And this doesn’t improve the success rate.

I’ve double checked all the IDs to ensure they’re correct.

So far there are two common factors between the messages that fail, one is a common user that is tagged and the other is that more than 2 people are tagged in those messages.

Any thoughts? Could there be something funny about this userID (I have checked it against his profile), does this zap just not work with more than 2 people tagged?
Is there anyway of finding out which channel in particular in the message Zapier is not finding?

Best answer by Danvers

Thanks for the clarification on that @kheiron.

As you suspected, it’s not possible to send a Slack message as a DM to a group of people; the Send Direct Message action only works when you’re sending a DM to only one user.

We do have a feature request open for the ability to send multi-user direct messages and I've added your email address as another vote for this addition. We use these feature lists to prioritise updates to the integrations that we maintain. I don't have an ETA of when or if this will happen, but we will definitely email you if we add it in the future.

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

+8

Liz_Roberts
Zapier Staff
1366 replies
Forum|Forum|5 years ago
June 30, 2020

Hi @kheiron ,

Thanks for reaching out- happy to help!

A couple questions to help us dig deeper: are you only looking to send messages as DMs or are any messages intended to go to shared channels? Also, are you receiving this error while testing? If so, could you try to skip the test step and see if that does the trick?

Will be on the lookout for your response!

K

kheiron
Author
Beginner
1 reply
Forum|Forum|5 years ago
July 1, 2020

Thanks @Liz_Roberts it is only DMs, although sometimes DMs to multiple-people so I’m not sure if that counts as a shared channel in this context?

I’m receiving the error sometimes whilst testing and whilst the zap is live.

Thanks for your help.

+12

Danvers
Zapier Staff
3731 replies
Answer
Forum|Forum|5 years ago
July 1, 2020

Thanks for the clarification on that @kheiron.

As you suspected, it’s not possible to send a Slack message as a DM to a group of people; the Send Direct Message action only works when you’re sending a DM to only one user.

We do have a feature request open for the ability to send multi-user direct messages and I've added your email address as another vote for this addition. We use these feature lists to prioritise updates to the integrations that we maintain. I don't have an ETA of when or if this will happen, but we will definitely email you if we add it in the future.

T