UPDATE: HQ and community members are working on a fix. More details at bottom of post.#

Hack Club Has A Problem. (It’s Slack)#

Slack (and salesforce) are greedy. But where does a Non-profit teaching high schoolers to code fall into this?

Well, I’ll put the workflow problem this way.

Imagine purchasing your meeting rooms Samsung TVs, everyone uses them constantly, and then Samsung emails you saying “hey, you’re using those too often — fix it.” You bring it to the CEO and he goes, “yeah, cool, shut them off.”

Sound odd?#

I thought so, but that’s what is happening with the Hack Club Slack.

At 4:23pm NZDT, there was a message posted on the #community channel. I have attached it below. “Hey y’all!

Due to repeated abuse of workflows, we sadly will be removing workflows from the Hack Club Slack on December 9th, 2025 This is not something we wanted, but sadly due to repeated abuse, and no way to prevent the abuse, it makes sense to disable them. We recommend moving your workflows to Slack bots as workflows may stop working.

We know this is a big change. So we are also launching a $100 bounty for someone that can create a privacy-conscious Slack bot that can be configured to add people to private channels, with approval and optional questions. This can be used as a replacement for personal and private channel adders. Put your GitHub in the thread if you want to participate ”

This was sudden, and with only 18 days of notice? I have ~7 Slack workflows and no knowledge on how to make a slack bot, even worse, Zach Latta said “Also - this is a community of programmers and I’ve never seen so much defense of a no code tool :-P”. It’s not the fact that its no-code, it’s that it was easy to quickly make one to say, ask what you did during your day at 5:45 PM everyday. HQ even relies on many no-code tools (Airtable and Zapier for example). Even people inside HQ didn’t even know this was happening. See the below message from Rowan in #community. “When the great Slack migration happened, core HQ people in HQ-HQ got a heads-up and had a meeting to discuss this. We talked it through, everyone could ask questions, and we wrote up migration guides for all.

This never happened for banning workflows.”

This left me with 3 questions.#

How am I going to make a slack bot in 18 days?
Why weren’t other people in HQ notified about this?
How screwed are we if Slack reached out to us about this? (Did i mention Slack reached out to us about this)

The best part? If we move to mattermost in 5 years (When our enterprise runs out) we are screwed again. To be clear, there was real abuse. Some workflows were being triggered thousands of times a day, flagging us as a problem. So yes, Slack has a reason to be concerned, but fixing abuse doesn’t require eliminating the entire feature for 20,000+ teenagers with 18 days of notice. Rate limits, caps, approvals, or workflows restricted to trusted people would’ve solved the abuse. Instead, we are losing the whole system.

UPDATE#

One part of what workflows were used for, joining private channels, has been implimented into Neon’s bot Zeon. Existing workflows will stay.

Message to Hack Club HQ#

If you want anything fixed to be more accurate or clarified, email me at josh [at] slitrostudio [dot] me Thanks!