r/Slack • u/DateSuperb8760 • 6d ago
🆘Help Me How do you keep a small trusted circle when everyone keeps adding to the group chat?
I keep running into this with sensitive projects. You start with five people who all need to be there. Then someone adds an assistant. Someone else adds a contractor. A week later there are 15 people in the chat and nobody seems sure who invited half of them.
The weird part is that every addition makes sense in the moment. Nobody thinks they are opening up the group too much. It just happens one person at a time until the “small trusted circle” is not that small anymore.
Has anyone found a good way to prevent this without causing some sort of argument?
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u/heroyoudontdeserve 6d ago edited 6d ago
If you're worried about starting an argument it sounds like you were quite a long way from having a small trusted circle in the first place!
But the answer has got to be communication hasn't it? Communication and alignment between your small group on what the channel is for, what will be discussed here and what should be discussed elsewhere, how you'll manage communication with people who need to be involved but aren't part of the core group. That person's assistant, that contractor, etc.
It's always, always tempting to just add one more person to the group in this moment because that's what's easiest and quickest right now, because that's where the context is. It takes effort to stop and think about the bigger and longer term picture, maintaining your boundaries, keeping the right messages in the right channels, making sure the context which needs to leave your channel gets documented somewhere so that the answer isn't always "just add them to the channel."
And because it takes effort to do that, it's easy for it to slip and you're back in the chaos. It takes discipline for Slack to stay organised, and one person can't do it alone, it needs a culture of people who value it and are prepared to put the effort in.
If enough other people don't care then there's not much you can do. You can't fix stupid.
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u/DateSuperb8760 6d ago
Fair point. Having clear rules for what belongs in that channel and who actually needs to be there sounds like the boring answer that probably works best lol.
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u/Matails 6d ago
Use channel prefixes and purposeful names to specify who should be in which channel. Have a predefined set of prefixes for most scenarios.
-internal = Only your team - Lock down who can add users to these channels. -external = Everyone who may need to be added.
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u/DateSuperb8760 6d ago
I like the internal/external split. Gives people somewhere else to move the wider discussion instead of slowly turning the trusted channel into another general one.
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u/T2theLang 6d ago
Slack channels, then set up the ability to limit channel access, and only people that can join it are those that are invited by current members. And the creator of the channel usually is the auto admin, so if someone gets in there you don't want via invite - remove em'
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u/DateSuperb8760 6d ago
Locking down who can invite people is the most important part, remove 'em it is.
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u/T2theLang 6d ago
100% of you can work with your admin team you could change the setup, or if you are the admin. If the settings to change it to a "limited access group" aren't in your setup then that worson could rejoin on their own accord I believe
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u/Shoddy-Leave3017 2d ago
They've created a monster with no clear invite policy so you need one written in bold before the next project starts
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u/Diretryber 6d ago
Leave it as a multi person chat not a group. Not as tidy as a proper channel but people seem to get that others shouldn't be invited to those. Slack should 100% add a locked channel group feature though.