Slack Discussions

Slack Discussions let you loop in product, engineering, or anyone else on your team directly from a support thread – without losing context or switching tools. The result: faster answers, better collaboration, and a smoother customer experience.

How Slack Discussions work

You can start a Slack Discussion in two ways:

• Click Start discussion from inside a thread in Plain

• Paste the thread link directly into a Slack channel where the Plain bot is installed

When the link is shared, Plain will unfurl the thread and show key context – so your team can see what’s going on without opening a separate tool.

Once a discussion has started:

• Messages, reactions, mentions, and attachments added in Slack will also show up in the Plain thread

• You can respond from either Slack or Plain – both stay perfectly synced

• Plain adds a “Resolve discussion” button to the Slack thread – anyone can click it when the internal conversation wraps up

• Once resolved, Plain automatically moves the thread to Close the loop – a helpful nudge to follow up with the customer

Slack Discussions are especially useful when your team supports complex products, needs fast internal input, or works closely with other functions to resolve issues.

Setup and requirements

To use Slack Discussions, you’ll need to:

1. Set up your Slack integration in Plain

2. Add the Plain bot to any Slack channel where you want to start discussions

Anyone in your workspace – even viewers – can start a discussion from a thread once the bot is installed.

How Slack handles thread links

For privacy and data hygiene, Plain does not automatically start a discussion every time someone posts a thread link. We’ll only create a discussion if:

• The link is posted by a Plain user

• The link is posted in a Slack channel that Plain has access to

• The link is not in a Slack Connect customer channel (unless you've configured it to allow that)

You can always adjust these defaults in your Slack integration settings. If needed, you can also fully disable Slack discussions and link unfurling.

Channel types and message handling

When Plain is added to a Slack channel:

• If it’s a Slack Connect channel, we classify it as a customer channel – messages from non-Plain users become support threads

• If it’s an internal channel, we classify it as a discussion channel – only messages related to active discussions are synced

This ensures clean, relevant data flows into Plain – and only when you want it to.