---
title: FOMObot Will Help With Your Slack FOMO
teaser: 'Introducing FOMOBot, the Slack bot that keeps productivity up while letting
  you know when you''re missing out on an important conversation.

  '
tags: slack,haskell,bot,web
author: Tony DiPasquale
published_on: 2016-05-05
---

[Slack], a relatively new messaging app for teams, has been booming in
popularity and bringing more fun to team communication. We've been using it for
over a year now and we love it. Slack makes it easy to create new channels and
add integrations that send automated messages. In fact we have more than 350+
channels covering topics like languages, projects, interest groups, and more.
With so many channels and so many messages, it can be difficult to keep up with
even 10% of them without getting distracted throughout the day.

[Slack]: https://slack.com

To avoid distraction, one could to turn off notifications or leave a bunch of
channels, but this would lead to [FOMO], or Fear of Missing Out. So we created a
Slack bot that will monitor all the Slack channels and let you know when
important conversations happen so you can join the discussion. This allows you
to ignore the once-in-a-while messages in channels but still participate in the
larger discussions when the occur.

[FOMO]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out

"How did you do this?", you ask. Introducing [FOMObot], a Slack bot that gives
you peace of mind that you won't be missing out. FOMObot hangs out in Slack
channels and monitors for increased activity. When the rate of messages spikes
above a pre-defined threshold, FOMObot notifies the `#fomo` channel. Users can
sit in the `#fomo` channel and choose to ignore the message or click the link to
open the channel with increased activity.

[FOMObot]: https://github.com/thoughtbot/fomobot

> I constantly have FOMO! How can I get FOMObot in my life?

Another great question! FOMObot is available as open source software. It is
written in [Haskell] and deployed to [Heroku]. You simply need to set a few
configurations through environment variables and you're ready to kick that fear.

For more details, check out the [GitHub repository].

[Haskell]: https://www.haskell.org
[Heroku]: https://heroku.com
[GitHub repository]: https://github.com/thoughtbot/fomobot

![](https://images.thoughtbot.com/fomobot/9en5ZsbORvqyfjASAndw_giphy.gif)