You’ll also need to click on the settings-gear icon in the upper right corner of the screen, and select the “Collect email addresses” option. To do so, click on “Untitled Question” and then click the trash-can icon towards the bottom of the screen. In fact, even the blank template comes with a default question that you’ll need to remove. The slack invitation form will only require a single email field, so it’s easiest to just pick the “blank” template and customize things from there. You’ll need a Google account for the remaining steps, so be sure to create one first if you don’t already have one.Īfter that, visit the Google Forms homepage where you should be greeted with a prompt to create a new form using any one of a variety of templates. You’ll also be asked about inviting other users after choosing your workspace URL, but that step is optional.įeel free to skip that and just send people a link to your signup form later on. Slack gives you real-time feedback about the availability of different URLs, so it’s easy to try things out and find something that’s a good match. Next, you’ll be able to give your group a name.Īnd finally, you can pick the URL for the community.

“Shared interest group” seems most fitting for a public Slack workspace, but choose whichever you think is most appropriate for your group. The password is fairly self-explanatory, but bear in mind that this account will have full administrator access to the workspace.Īfter your personal information has been filled out, Slack will ask you about the workspace that you’re creating. Note that the full name will be included in the invitation emails, so you may wish to use something other than your actual name (like the name of your organization). Next, Slack will ask you to fill out your name and your display name for use in the Slack community. You’ll need to enter this code on the next page before you can proceed further. Otherwise, you can begin by visiting /create where you’ll be greeted by a form prompting you to enter your email address.Īfter you submit your email address, Slack will send you an email with a six digit confirmation code. This process is fairly intuitive if you’ve used Slack before, so feel free to skip ahead to Create a Google Form if you have this handled already. The first thing that you’ll need to do is to actually create the Slack workspace for your community. The process is fairly straightforward, and we hope that it will be a useful alternative to hosting your own backend to handle invitations. In the rest of this tutorial, we’ll walk through the process of creating a Slack Channel, and building an invitation form like this one. Our end result looks like this, but your own form can be styled however you want with CSS. This solution is reliable, free, and can be hosted on any static site. Instead of going with one of these existing solutions, we decided to piece together a custom form which uses a combination of Google Sheets and Google Forms to process form submissions and send out invitations. These are nice enough, but managing any backend app creates operational overhead, and it seems like overkill for something as simple as an invitation form. There are a handful of nice open-source projects which facilitate running a backend to handle Slack invitation form submissions, such as slackin, slack-invite-automation, and slack-invite. Needing to update invitation URLs frequently is a bit of a hassle, so the majority of public Slack communities opt to create their own invitation forms. If you want to make your Slack community open to anybody, then your options are to either send invitations to anyone who expresses interest, or to generate shared invite URLs which expire after four weeks. We wanted it to be open to anyone who wanted to join, but Slack unfortunately doesn’t really provide any sort of open-access Slack communities or channels.

We recently created a public Slack community dedicated to web scraping in order to provide a general forum for people to discuss topics related to browser automation, headless browsers, scraping frameworks, data pipelining, or anything else along those lines.

Joining publc slack workspaces