Slack – Act as multiple users in Slack

slack

Not sure if this is possible, but I'd like to be able to post in slack as multiple different aliases. (I'm running a play-by-post on slack, and would like to have a "user" for each significant NPC)

Is this something I can do smoothly, or is my only option to maintain a lot of separate slack users and keep logging in as different ones?

Best Answer

This is possible, but only by adding this functionality with a Slack app.

Standard Slack functionality

The standard Slack does not support different aliases for a user. So if you want to change your persona on Slack you easiest approach would indeed be to create multiple user accounts.

To make it easier to use multiple user accounts on Slack I would recommend to run each user in a different browser. (e.g. User A in Chrome, User B in Firefox, User C in IE). Since Slack is storing the user authentication with cookies, you can run all users simultaneously that way. I do this all the time, e.g. to test workflows between multiple users on one machine.

Using a Slack app

But you can use a Slack app for posting your messages. That app can include an individual username and icon in the message, which would allow you to post as an NPC.

This works with the web API method chat.postMessage by providing a custom username and icon_url property. So you could make a simple Slack app that can be called with a slash command (e.g. /npc mario "Hi this is Mario, have you seen the princess?" or use a Dialog for that) to post in the current channel as an NPC.

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