Slack Notifications
How Tenpace keeps your team informed about pull requests without the noise.
Design philosophy
Most PR bots flood your Slack channel with a new message for every event. Tenpace takes a different approach: one message per PR, updated in place. Reviews, CI status, and other changes update the existing message instead of creating new ones. Your channel stays readable.
PR message lifecycle
When a PR opens
A message is posted to your configured Slack channel containing:
- PR title and link
- Author (with Slack @mention if they've linked their account)
- Requested reviewers (with Slack @mentions for linked members)
- PR description (optionally in a thread)
- Current CI status
- Diff stats (additions, deletions)
As the PR evolves
The existing message is edited in place when:
- A reviewer approves or requests changes
- CI checks complete (pass or fail)
- New commits are pushed
- The PR is merged or closed
The message status line always reflects the current state, so anyone can look at the channel and know exactly what's happening.
When a PR is converted to draft
The Slack message is deleted to avoid cluttering the channel with work-in-progress PRs. When the PR is marked ready for review, a new message is posted.
Direct messages
Review notifications
When a reviewer submits a review, the PR author receives a Slack DM. This is immediate and personal — reviewers know their work is visible, authors know when they have feedback.
Daily PR digest
When the daily digest is enabled, each team member receives a personalized DM summarizing:
- Needs your review — PRs where you're a requested reviewer
- Your PRs awaiting review — Your open PRs that still need approvals
- Stale PRs — Your PRs with no recent activity
The digest only includes PRs that need action. If you have nothing pending, no DM is sent. Configure the digest in Settings → Reminders.
@mention policies
You can control how aggressively Tenpace @mentions people in the reviewer mention policy setting:
| Policy | Behavior |
|---|---|
all | @mention all requested reviewers (default) |
connected_only | Only @mention reviewers who've linked their GitHub account |
none | Show reviewer names without @mentions |
Configure this per channel in Settings → Channels.
CI status
Tenpace listens for GitHub check suite completion events and updates the PR message with the result. If a check suite fails, the PR message clearly shows the failure state.
CI status also gates the pr.ready_to_merge webhook event — a PR won't be considered ready if CI is failing, even if all reviewers have approved.
External PR acknowledgment
When a PR from a contributor outside your team is opened on a watched repository, Tenpace can send them a DM acknowledging their contribution. Enable this in channel settings with Acknowledge external PRs.
Customizing notifications
Each Slack channel can be configured independently:
- Repository filters — Only show PRs from specific repositories
- Label filters — Only show PRs with specific GitHub labels
- Show repo name in messages — Useful for multi-repo channels
- Post descriptions to thread — Keeps the main channel message compact
- Show author in subtitle — Toggle author attribution