how to export a specific thread?

[tessus]

I came across this great tool, but I am a bit puzzled as to how to export/dump a specific thread.
Channels can be extremly large and I am intersted in a specific thread. How can I export that thread alone?

In an org with 2000 channels slackdump -c would not give me a specific thread id, or at least I probably won't find it in there.
When I copy a link to a thread in Slack, I get 2 ids in the link. Can I use that info to dump a specific thread? If yes, how?

[tshddx]

slackdump -c works for me. It outputs a table like this:

2022/01/20 10:12:32 initializing...
2022/01/20 10:12:32 > caching users...
2022/01/20 10:12:32 > caching channels, might take a while...
2022/01/20 10:12:32 retrieving data...
2022/01/20 10:12:32 done
ID           Arch  Saved  What
C0ABCDE1    arch  saved  #random
C0ABCDE2    -     saved  #general
C0ABCDE3    -     saved  #movies
C0ABCDE4    -     saved  #books

[tessus]

Hmm, I thought I was clear in my desciption. Take a random channel and start a thread in that channel. Now I want to export this single thread. (The message and all replies to that message (reply in thread)). I do not need the 500,000 other messages in that channel. I only need this single thread.

[tshddx]

Oh sorry, you're talking about actual "threads" in Slack. I.e. conversation replies. This command line tool doesn't expose that functionality directly, but it probably wouldn't be too hard to directly expose the dumpThread function. The underlying Slack API method this uses is here: https://api.slack.com/methods/conversations.replies

[tessus]

Cool, thanks. I will have a look at it when I have a bit more time. If there is an API call available, it shouldn't be too hard to add this to the script (oops, I meant Go app).

[rusq]

Hey @tessus, unfortunately currently there's no way currently to dump a specific thread without dumping the whole conversation/channel. Threads support was added recently and there's certainly may ways of improvement. That's a good suggestion, thank you, i'll look into that.

[rusq]

There's a draft implementation in a url-dl branch, if you want to try it out. I'm just finishing some tests and planning to do some docs as well, when the constellations are properly aligned.

You can check it out with

git pull && git checkout url-dl

compile:

go build ./cmd/slackdump

Or, alternatively use these binaries:
slackdump-linux.zip
slackdump-windows.zip
slackdump-darwin.zip

And then, you'd need to specify the -url command line flag like so:

./slackdump -f -r text -url <URL1> [URL2] ... [URLn]

Alternatively, you could chuck all the URLs you want to fetch to the text file, and run it like so

./slackdump -i all_those_lengthy_urls.txt -f -r text

The URLs can be either of channels or a thread.

Would be great to have some feedback on this before I merge :) If not - that's also fine, i'll just merge as is, after I finish tests.

[tessus]

Awesome, I will test it in a couple of days.

[rusq]

@tessus merged, please use v1.3.0, the readme was updated too!

[tessus]

I am sorry. I had so many meetings the last 2 weeks that my head was exploding half way through the day. I totally forgot to test and send you feedback. Next week should be a bit better and I will hopefully get to it.

But rest assured I will test this and use it. I really need this feature. ;-)

[rusq]

No problem, hope it works for you!

[tessus]

Yes, it works! Nice.

I have noticed one small issue though. It might not have anything to do with this change though: certain characters are html encoded.

Architecture: `Project` -> `project specific OTel Collector (Gateway)` -> `centralized OTel Collector Gateway` -> `Backend`

turns to

Architecture: `Project` -> `project specific OTel Collector (Gateway)` -> `centralized OTel Collector Gateway` -> `Backend`

[rusq]

@tessus thank you! Good catch with escaped characters - fixed it, will be available in 1.3.1, almost done with it, will update the releases in couple of days, just need to do some final testing.

[tessus]

Great, thank you!