Unfurled previews are too big

[davidcelis]

Sometimes a teammate will open a PR, and the preview ends up being so big that it's almost as big as the Slack window itself (which is maximized)!

I feel like these previews could be condensed much more; there's so much text before the Show more link ends up being displayed, and its exacerbated by the PR having an image that gets previewed below

[iAmWillShepherd]

The Desktop team is having issues with previews taking up too much real-estate causing our conversations to be lost in the mix. Something that would solve this problem for us is to not automatically expand a notification. Instead, allow the expansion of a notification to be an opt-in by the person viewing it. I've sent @bkeepers a DM with a GIF illustrating how much screen is taken up by these.

[bkeepers]

Thanks for the feedback!

Instead, allow the expansion of a notification to be an opt-in by the person viewing it.

Unfortunately, Slack doesn't give us this level of control over the message formatting. They fold content based on number of characters and there's not a way to mark content as collapsable. Everyone in the channel is given the same view of the messages.

We've had a few teams report concerns with the size of the message, and it's usually when there's an issue template or something that includes a lot of lines but few characters (since Slack folds solely based on character count).

The option we've been considering is to add a per-channel setting for “condensed” messages that exclude things like the Issue/PR body from notifications.

Would that solve your problem here?

[iAmWillShepherd]

The option we've been considering is to add a per-channel setting for “condensed” messages that exclude things like the Issue/PR body from notifications.
Would that solve your problem here?

Yes, I think that's a fine solution given the constraints Slack places on us.

[jprestel-rue]

JIRA integration similarly offers a configuration that gives you a condensed version of previews.

[stale]

Is this still relevant? If so, just comment with any updates and we'll leave it open. Otherwise, if there is no further activity, it will be closed.

[jprestel-rue]

Yes still a desired feature.

[pmyjavec]

This is an important fix, it's basically stopping our org from adopting this integration because it basically spams the entire channel.

[iAmWillShepherd]

This is still an issue in the #desktop channel as well.

[ziggythehamster]

I would also like to be able to configure certain event types to always be condensed. For example, one pull request in my channel right now takes up 6 lines:

Pull request opened by <username>
<icon> <username>
#<issue number> <issue title>
Labels
<label>
<repo> | <timestamp>

That's way more than the old integration and also way too much detail for that. I'd much rather:

<icon> <username>
Pull request opened: #<issue number> <issue title>
<repo> | <timestamp>

[ziggythehamster]

Also if I look at the screenshot OP posted, then he's having exactly the same issue I am, except that the PR I'm looking at doesn't have a description in it. I think there's a bug here, so I've opened a new issue: #668.

[mikelax]

I would also like to bump this feature as something that would be perfect to handle with a small user configuration option. The option be either be at the Channel level or overall App level (maybe Channel settings would override App).

As mentioned earlier, the Jira <-> slack integration allows you to choose between a Message Style of what they call Clean and Compact. Something similar here would be amazing, as currently Previews can be really large, especially if there is an image in the PR body.

[antonmorant]

Experiencing the same problem with noise from verbose previews. A very good description of the issue can be found here: #595.

In my ideal world, a github PR/issue preview would only have a few of lines mentioning: repo, PR title, author, status (open/closed), and labels.

[NathanSweet]

Issues are too large, it's terribly distracting. We can't use the GitHub integration at all because of this.

[antonmorant]

I ended up uninstalling this integration and going back to the "Legacy" Github Notifications app for my team. It's a pity because controlling subscriptions from slack with commands is a great idea, but the core functionality is just not going to work if you can't control messages' appearance.

[skyvondave]

The unfurling is just too much information most of the time:

Seriously, this is too much. Please chop it down or reduce the image size or let us configure how much unfurls.

[NathanSweet]

Months go by and this continues to be terrible.

[davidcelis]

@skyvondave That's not related to the GitHub integration… That's just a regular link unfurl. For the Google Play store.

[bluetidepro]

A condensed version of the output would be perfect. Just omit certain fields that get pushed to slack.

[rgeraldporter]

These messages are way too long, especially for those of us who use checklists and PR templates.

[liangmicha]

+1 -- This is still an issue for our team, would be great if there was more flexibility in how much is shown

[mohammedzee1000]

+1 to this. We enabled this recently and now everyone is hating it for too much information, if this is not fixed soon, we might just move away from this integration

[repsejnworb]

Please fix faster. It's been a year.
We loved the integration, but nearly instantly turned it off due to the spam.

[jLouzado]

when multiple github PRs are linked it shows a lovely condensed version of the PR title and just chills. Why is the bot so extra when it's just one link?

[skyvondave]

@skyvondave That's not related to the GitHub integration… That's just a regular link unfurl. For the Google Play store.

Slack is unfurling too much text and too large of a picture. It adds up to taking up a crazy amount of space and overwhelming the hand-typed message above it.

[jpbufe3]

Thanks for the feedback!

Instead, allow the expansion of a notification to be an opt-in by the person viewing it.

Unfortunately, Slack doesn't give us this level of control over the message formatting. They fold content based on number of characters and there's not a way to mark content as collapsable. Everyone in the channel is given the same view of the messages.

We've had a few teams report concerns with the size of the message, and it's usually when there's an issue template or something that includes a lot of lines but few characters (since Slack folds solely based on character count).

The option we've been considering is to add a per-channel setting for “condensed” messages that exclude things like the Issue/PR body from notifications.

Would that solve your problem here?

@bkeepers - I think the condensed view would be a great feature. Is this work captured anywhere? Should I open a new issue asking for this feature or is this issue sufficient?

[gareth]

@jpbufe3 It looks like #162 is the request you're looking for?

[jpbufe3]

@jpbufe3 It looks like #162 is the request you're looking for?

@gareth yes! Might be good to close this issue and mark it as a duplicate of #162?

[export-mike]

👍 this is keeping me up at night thinking I've caused wasted pixels on my fellow team mates super wide screen monitors - I've lodged a support ticket too

[FlipEverything]

So, you are telling me that this is the intended behavior for the GitHub slack integration? Why do you (or Slack) breaks the line after ~ 100 characters when I have a widescreen QHD display? Every notification could fit in a line... This wastes the pixels on my monitor...

[NathanSweet]

It's pretty obvious by now that no one cares.

[FlipEverything]

Good to know! 🤪

[NathanSweet]

Sorry, it wasn't directed at you. It's just a joke that this has always been an issue and the poor behavior doesn't get addressed for 4+ years.

[FlipEverything]

I know...

[jsoref]

See also #1262

[chris-wall-stint]

Frustratingly, there's a lovely compact GitHub preview when your message contains two GitHub links:

But editing the message back to one link again causes the preview to refresh to the beast preview 🙄

[edit: oops just seen this has already been mentioned above]

[JayDouglass]

Sadly I'm going to have to turn this integration off because of channel spam. I really only wanted to have a 1-3 lines of text telling me when a PR was opened or merged. Combined with dependabot PRs it's too much.

[devurandom]

Frustratingly, there's a lovely compact GitHub preview when your message contains two GitHub links:

But editing the message back to one link again causes the preview to refresh to the beast preview roll_eyes

For me, too, having the compact preview (the one used when multiple GH links are posted) always would be preferrable. I would like to have a setting to always use that style.

[strativd]

+1 — also found a workaround!

Create all PRs as drafts 🎉

It's not an ideal workflow but it works ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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[c-hardch]

Hi @ashokirla Anyone going to assign and work on this request?

[breen-laerdal]

Thanks for the feedback!

Instead, allow the expansion of a notification to be an opt-in by the person viewing it.

Unfortunately, Slack doesn't give us this level of control over the message formatting. They fold content based on number of characters and there's not a way to mark content as collapsable. Everyone in the channel is given the same view of the messages.

We've had a few teams report concerns with the size of the message, and it's usually when there's an issue template or something that includes a lot of lines but few characters (since Slack folds solely based on character count).

The option we've been considering is to add a per-channel setting for “condensed” messages that exclude things like the Issue/PR body from notifications.

Would that solve your problem here?

Is this something that's still being considered? We're trying to clean up our channel noise and our Github PRs take up almost half of the screen whenever they are opened

[EdwardSalkeld]

It doesn't look like this is going anywhere, which is a shame as it's clearly both strongly requested and technically possible. Please can this get some attention?

[wesbos]

anytime I share a few links I have to spend 20 seconds clicking the X so I don't totally destroy our group chat. They are way too big right now.

Like, I love Marco, but I don't ever need any photo embed to be this large

[a613]

For a 2-second PR, I don't get why this is still an issue 6 years later. You don't even need to truncate on a word boundary, just literally slice the string to 200 chars or whatever. Even plaintext with no formatting would be better than the status quo.

Or even zero content, and just preview the title!

[michaelaflores]

I can't believe how long this issue has been open, but I'd like to chime in that the collective man-hours spent clicking the "x" to remove the preview due to these massive embeds is well worth the time to fix.

[nicolasassi]

Any advances about this? My team is considering dropping the integration all together as it just messes up the whole channel everyday

[1DanielC]

Upvoting this. It would be nice to set preview length or drop the PR content in the preview