Visible Threads

If you want the long version, you can read a blog post I wrote about it. Or here's the TL;DR:

Siloed conversations. When people talk in threads, only those who have interacted with the conversation get a notification... and the rest of the team either click on the conversation link or totally miss it.

When people talk on a thread I haven't interacted with (and especially if the original message is outside the main window) I can't really tell that a conversation is happening at all. This plugin makes it as if all the people talking on your current channel chose to send their threaded messages to the channel.

This is particularly important in teams that work across timezones. When I start my day, I want to go back in time and see what people talked about. If they do so in threads, I need to either click and read those messages on the 2nd pane (and that's if they didn't talk in a thread that's older... I have no way of seeing that conversation).

By treating all the thread messages as if they were broadcasted (that is: as if the author had decided to send it to the channel). To make it less noisy, it removes some elements included on broadcasted messages.

Before:

After:

And to quickly identify related messages, when you hover over a threaded message, all the related messages are highlighted... so that you don't need to expand the thread to see what people are talking about.

Here's a gif showing it... check out how the messages in the same conversation get highlighted as the mouse moves.

• All the messages people send to a thread appear on the main channel.
• You won't be able to tell when somebody chooses to broadcast a message to the channel. Broadcasted messages look exactly the same as non-broadcasted messages for you.

Nothing changes for them. They see threaded messages hidden behind the threads, and only those where the author chooses to broadcast in the channel. They won't see your messages on the main channel unless you choose to broadcast them.