How to see everyone who is online on slack?
We use the communication tool Slack. It shows online and away users that I have had direct message conversations with recently in my left sidebar. I would like to see everyone who is currently online, all the online users on our slack server, in a list. Having a list of users in a sidebar in a chat application usually means the online users, but not for slack, which confuses me greatly and often makes me falsely assume that a user is not online, when they are, I have just not sent a direct message to them recently.
Googling, searching the slack help and asking slackbot has not yet yielded any answers for me.
Is this feature possible to activate, or is there a plugin for it?
Answer
Slack works a bit differently from what you might be used from other communication apps.
The list of users in your left sidebar does NOT represent the list of online users, but instead the list of users that you have recently had direct message communication with.
The online status of a user is reflected by the green circle next to his name. However, a user can still be reached even when the circle is grey (e.g. he might get a notification on his mobile when you text him). And if the user is on a mobile the grey circle just means that the Slack app is currently not active, but not that the user has logged out.
Also, a user will always remain in your list direct-message list and in the channel sidebar even when logged out as long he is a member of that channel and has a valid account.
The best approach to see everyone who is online is to go to a channel that everyone is in (e.g. your #general channel) and look for who has a green circle next to his name.
So in summary check for the color of the circle next to a user name to determine if he is online and remember remains reachable even if the circle is grey.