A huge amount of tribal knowledge lives in Slack — the fix a senior engineer posted at 2 a.m., the workaround support shares every week. Connect Slack channel history and BeforeQuery indexes those threads so the answers become searchable and citable.
This source reads channel history into your knowledge base. If you want a bot that answers questions inside Slack, set up the Slack bot instead — the two work great together.

​
Prerequisites

  • Permission to create a Slack app in your Slack workspace.
  • A BeforeQuery workspace owner role.

​
Data ingested

One channel, one document:
  • Channel name as the title
  • Every message in the channel’s recent history, oldest first, each with its author and timestamp
A Slack source indexes whole channels, not individual threads — so a citation opens the channel rather than the message that answered. For per-thread documents with per-thread citations, a Discord forum source is the closer fit today.

​
Set up the connector

1

Create a Slack app with read scopes

In the Slack API console, create an app for your workspace and grant it bot token scopes to read channels and history (e.g. channels:read, channels:history). Install the app and copy the bot token (xoxb-…).
2

Invite the bot to the channels you want indexed

In each channel, run /invite @yourapp. The connector can only read channels the bot is a member of.
3

Add the source in BeforeQuery

In the dashboard, open Knowledge Base → Sources → Add source and choose Slack. Paste the bot token and, optionally, a list of channel IDs to restrict indexing. Leave the list empty to index every channel the bot can read.

​
Connection settings

​
Keeping content in sync

Slack re-syncs every 6 hours — there is no schedule to configure, and Sync on the source’s page runs one now if you cannot wait. Only changed content is re-embedded. See Sources Overview.

​
Troubleshooting

  • A channel isn’t being indexed? The bot isn’t a member — /invite it, then sync.
  • Worried about sensitive chatter? Restrict indexing to curated channels via channel IDs, enable PII masking, and consider marking Slack-derived documents restricted so they answer only for workspace members.