Slack Updates - 2026 // RSMF 88

Welcome back to another message crawler update. I think in this video what we should do is go over some of the things that were happening with Slack as far as message crawler application as well as what's been going on with the Slack as a service. So let's do that today. Let's go to my screen and get started. All right. So we have message crawler on the screen and the first place we should look at is convert. This is where I added uh some changes to the conversion tool. Uh let's go and say select import JSON and pick our channels file and expand this a little bit. Uh so the first thing you'll see here is we have something called estimate size and count. If I click on that, I will get the estimate number of messages as well as estimated attachment size. Now, this is really cool because this will allow you to get an idea of how long the conversion process will take, right? So, if we have like four 4 GB or something uh or 4 megabytes in this case, and it's not a big deal, you know, it's going to go quickly. But if you run your estimate and you see really high message count or really high gigabyte counts, you know, downloading of attachments is going to take a long time. And then maybe you can choose to skip certain groups or maybe process them later or something like that. So that's the estimate count and size tool. Now the next thing I have here is tag untag. And this helps you tag certain channels or folders that you want converted. So let's pretend I have a folder I don't want converted and it's tagged right now. So I'm going to click here and I'm just going to paste uh item here. And I can actually do multiple if I would like. So we have two items and I'm going to say unselect found items and if I do this you see there two boxes got unchecked and same thing same way I can you know check them if I want to. Uh this is helpful if you have like a big list of channels that you want converted or don't want converted and you want quick way of checking or unchecking them. So this is as far as new features in Slack convert. Next we need to talk about uh some of the problems we were having or we as all of us were having with uh some of the Slack data. As you know with Slack data sets attachments do not come in the export and you have to download them separately. In order to download them we have links inside the JSON file and message roller follows those links and downloads files. What's been happening is Slack has been changing how long those links stay alive. Basically, those links expire after a while. And what I think they did around October is they made those links alive for only like couple of weeks. And of course, everyone got upset like, whoa, what's going on? This is this is too short. And then they've extended that period of time. Uh but I don't know what they extended it to. So if you have trouble downloading attachments, uh you can do the normal process where you take the link from uh JSON, copy and paste it into your browser and see if the attachments work, right? If it doesn't, spot check it. Try all of them. And if none of them work, it's either because the there was an access restriction on a Slack environment, like an enterprise environment, you could lock down downloading of attachments, or most likely it's because your export is too old. uh the only way I know to fix it is to redownload the collection. Now, there are other ways that I've been exploring uh that that attachments could be downloaded, but they're not really practical. Uh what I could do um as a developer, I can create like a little chatbot and you would have to add the chatbot inside the Slack environment to uh every channel. Sorry, not a chatbot, just a bot, right? So uh we create a bot that gets added to all the channels and then from whichever channel you want to download attachments from message crawler can ask the bot and it will grab the attachments. I tested it theoretically it works practically. I mean who's going to do that for you know thousands of channels. So that's not an option. Uh so that's the only real option is to redownload your slack collection if your attachments have stopped working. Next thing we have to talk about is corrupt JSONs. So here is an interesting thing that's been happening lately. If we look at our channels.json right here, you'll see that we have groups um right? So we have groups. This is one channel. Then we have another channel here and they follow specific um structure. We got uh braces here with a comma separating different channel descriptions. uh what somebody reported to me is that commas sometimes are missing. So just like that you have one brace to the next and it was it would happen randomly right so I told them like hey this this is impossible because these things are generated automatically so there is no way this would be randomly missing someone must have went in here and they said I want to delete this channel and I don't want anyone to know that it ever existed and they did this this was my theory this is what I told him like look I am absolutely sure this is exactly what happened somebody just did a bad deletion They removed a few channels and now the file format is broken. However, I got report from another source that they experienced same problem. And so that makes me think maybe there is a problem on Slack site. Maybe there is something wrong with the way these JSON files are generated. Normally as a developer you wouldn't have this granular control. you would just basically take tell your uh serialization component to just group objects together, throw them in the list and save them to a file. Like you wouldn't be dealing with the individual commas and brackets and stuff, but who knows, maybe they do and maybe there is some kind of bug. So the only way to fix it is put your comments in the right place, right? And and you will get um error in message crawler when you're trying to import channels or groups or whichever JSON. uh you'll get an error message saying unable to read JSON something something and that's usually where the problem comes in. Um I'm not going to put any fixes just yet or try to even fix it because this one is really crazy to to try to fix. Uh that means I have to read this line by line and do all kinds of fun stuff. Uh I think Slack is probably the one who needs to take care of this. So we'll give them a little bit of time to fix it. But if you have an issue loading JSON files like channels.json, that is a known problem. Uh this was happening end of 2025, so like December, I've been seeing that problem. It is January right now. Uh so we'll see, maybe they'll fix it. So those are all the updates I have for Slack. Um check them out. Let me know what you think. And thank you for checking out this update. I will see you on