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When you send a message with "/gator" or the Gator Slack shortcut, Gator tries its best to perfectly preserve the contents and formatting of your message when it's delivered to your recipient. Most text formatting Slack offers is preserved in Gator messages, like the use of bold, italics, lists, block quotes, and code snippets.
Unfortunately, because of limitations of the Slack API Gator uses to integrate with your Slack team, in some circumstances attachments or links you include in your Gator message may not be preserved. Depending on how you include them in your Gator message, they may be stripped out before your new message ever reaches Gator's servers.
We have an open ticket with Slack to resolve this limitation and will continue to raise this issue with them. But until then, read on to learn how to work around this limitation and include links and attachments in your Gator messages.
How to send links with your Gator messages
Gator will successfully deliver links you include in your message as long as those links are spelled out in the contents of your message.
Most people share links like this on Slack already, and so chances are good you have never experienced issues with links in your Gator messages. But if you're the type of person who likes to add links to your message by highlighting text and adding your link with the link icon in the Slack user interface, it's possible you've run into this issue.
Thankfully, the workaround is simple: whenever you want to include a link in a message you send with Gator, paste it fully in the contents of your message. Your link will be clickable when Gator shows you the confirmation of your new message.
How to send attachments with your Gator messages
Follow these steps to work around Slack's limitation on using attachments with apps like Gator:
- In Slack, open your Slack direct message channel with your own Slack username
- Upload the file you would like to include as an attachment with your Gator message
- Once uploaded, use Slack's "Copy link to file" feature to get the unique link for your file, either by clicking the "Share" icon when hovering over your file or using the file's "..." menu and clicking "Copy link to file"
- Go back to the conversation you want to use with Gator and author your new Gator message. Paste the link to your file at the end of your message before you create your Gator message
You will see the link to your file appear in the confirmation message Gator provides after you create your message, like in the screenshot below.
If you click that link, you'll see Slack open up your file in the right column of your Slack user interface. The recipients of your message will be able to do the same when Gator delivers your message later on.
