Dibs On Stuff: advanced queuing for Slack and Discord

The language selection menu, allowing the user to choose which language to with Dibs On Stuff.

The Dibs On Stuff user interface being rendered in French.

Diverse teams?

Dibs On Stuff PRO now speaks multiple languages.

Got a language request? Just ask 😎 🍻

A screenshot from the Slack app marketplace, showing the old Dibs logo and the new Dibs logo. The old version is small and weak, like a baby bird without any feathers. The new version has thicker lines and a blue background - like a pterodactyl soaring across the seas.

Gave the logo a splash of paint...

We wanted to make the icon better at small resolutions so the lines for the shell are thicker and the ocean blue background seemed like a nice addition for a conch shell.

Ideas for Discord API:

* Custom validation errors in modals would be nice

* Overflow menu buttons w-b-nice

* Dropdowns that permit free-form text entry w-b-nice

ps: btw allowing JSON responses, rather than new POSTs to endpoint is awesome, TY! (also faster UX for the user)

#discord #discordapi

A screenshot from Discord of the amazing queuing app named Dibs On Stuff. Dibs is a no-nonsense way to take turns (for example) with staging environments - or anything else - with your people.

The Discord version of Dibs On Stuff just got a long-overdue update! 🍨😋

* Ephemeral messages 🧨💥
* Buttons, menus and modals 🍾🥂
* Without disruption to the normal text based UI ⌨️🕵️

#discord #devops #chatops #productivity

A small cartoon drawing of a toaster, with a piece of bread sitting next to it in a rather disappointing fashion.

When the world asks for a Brave Little Toaster parable...

It's a new blog article. Written by a real person. And hopefully soon to be read by one too. Have at it! 🍻

dibsonstuff.com/the-dirtiest...

The new Call Dibs screen, where one can call dibs on an existing queue, or create a new queue. The screen allows you to pick the queue, specify an optional reason for calling dibs, and set a timeout for automatically releasing your hold on the queue. (Eg: you only need the staging server for 1 hour)

A configuration screen for customizing all of the advanced features of dibs. Things like setting up approved queue names, or setting up API keys.

Dibs On Stuff just got an upgrade! 😋

✨ A brand new "Call dibs" screen
🧠 Popup controls for the advanced features
🧭 Navigation buttons to get around
🚀 and manage fleets of queues with group aliases

People-friendly changes for your team. Upgrade your Dibs plan today ❤️

#slack #devops #chatops

A gianotosaurus toy from one of the Jurassic sequels. Upon its head a hat. Upon the hat a conch. Upon the conch rests the fate of a thousand urgent deployments.

Methinks this lizard seeks to woo!

dibsonstuff.com
#slack #devops #merch

Take turns without talking to people 😇

A short comparison between the top queuing apps:
dibsonstuff.com/comparison.h...

‪Cheers to an engineering team somewhere in Munich, what fine taste you have🔥☕

Purrfect, this is the way😻

www.instagram.com/reel/DDOOPeM...

Or as a #slack message:

/dibs on vent for 2h

dibsonstuff.com

Also: It must have been pretty painful to do a single-customer data restore from a backup. (Believe me I know). So, many, many, thank-yous to the patient Slack engineers 💖💖💖

Products Shop for Dibs On Stuff gear, t-shirts and fun

2025-04-16 09:30 (GMT+10)

We've reached out to the initial customer who reported the issue and offered them some merch from the shop.dibsonstuff.com store, and it looks like that's the end of the adventure. Phew.

Lesson learned: **never change anything ever again.** 👻

2025-04-16 08:00 (GMT+10)

So, root cause: Slack have a limit of 10 apps for Free plan. When I downgraded from Pro they nuked our apps in our single Slack instance. Ok fine. **But also destroyed any apps we'd created.**

They acknowledged that it was a serious error and that they're fixing it asap.

2025-04-16 08:00 (GMT+10)

Slack restored the app from a backup. We can see it again. We can administrate it again. It can be installed again. It shows up in the Slack Marketplace. It shows up in the Brilliant Bots page. The crick in my neck suddenly releases.

2025-04-16 04:11 (GMT+10)

Slack support had internally escalated and let us know that help was on the way. 🐎

2025-04-15 19:30 (GMT+10)

We started digging through logs to try and figure out which clients were impacted so we could reach out to them.

Curiously, the logs were still thundering along. The ghost app was still working away and no other customers reached out to us.

What the heck was going on?

2025-04-15 17:30 (GMT+10)

The full realization of how badly it was going to suck if hundreds of Slack Workspaces were going to be impacted was beginning to set in. We offered up every tiny little idea we could come up with to Slack support.

You may have detected a note of desperation in my tone 😅

2025-04-15 09:30 (GMT+10)

Support mentioned the date of the deletion. It would turn out to be a vital clue. It coincided with when we had made a Slack plan change on the 9th.

We had temporarily enabled the Pro plan to experiment with Workflow Builder Steps for Dibs (it didn't pan out).

2025-04-15 08:30 (GMT+10)

Slack support got back to us. Unfortunately the news was not good: Someone had deleted Dibs On Stuff. Like the app itself had been destroyed. Literally hundreds of Slack Workspaces were going to be impacted. It was suggested that maybe someone at our end had deleted it.

2025-04-14 23:33 (GMT+10)

We noticed that our logs were still scrolling past happily. Dibs was still being used aggressively, but **we** didn't have access to it anymore.

Neither in the Slack Marketplace, nor to make config changes ourselves.

It had become a GHOST app! 👻

2025-04-14 18:12 (GMT+10)

We reported the issue to Slack support. Mentioned that it was urgent and added some downtime notices to our homepage.

We had recently jumped through some hoops to try to enable Dibs as an Org-level Slack app... could that have been the problem?

2025-04-14 17:58 (GMT+10)

A customer informed us that Dibs was no longer in the Slack Marketplace and couldn't be installed. Indeed it no longer appeared in searches and it appeared that Dibs was completely unavailable to use.

It was beginning to look like the first real downtime in 4 years.

We're back! 😅

We were recently hit with a bit of an incident in the #slack Marketplace.

All is resolved now, but I'll dive into the specifics in the comments here.

Huge appreciation to Shelby from Slack and the other engineers who showed up and got things sorted 💖

(phew! 🎉🎉🎉💃💃💃)

-- Alex
🤠🐯🐧

A screenshot from the Slack marketplace app store, which is featuring the Slack app Dibs On Stuff at the top of the page.

The Slack marketplace just featured Dibs as one of their Brilliant Bots 🧠🐚🚀

#slack #homerwoopwoopdance #devops #chatops

(nawww! thanks Slack ❤️)

Recently added some low-poly designs to the Dibs On Stuff gear, check it out:

shop.dibsonstuff.com

#devops #slack #design

If you've ever found yourself wishing that Dibs could do some weird and wonderful new thing, just shout out.

It's how all the other features got built 🧑‍🔧💥

Tiny fix: When you've approved only particular conch names, and then try to use an unapproved one, the suggestion list has been updated to be alphabetized. Not exciting I know, but it's the little things.

Just a heads up that we've reset everyone's free one month trial of the Extra features - have at it!

(i.e. if you're on the free plan and you want to try out the paid features, just type `/dibs extras` to enable the paid features for free for a month, no CC required).

We've just rolled out event webhooks for Dibs On Stuff! 🤠

So you can subscribe your platforms to queuing events in Slack and Discord.

(Eg: your CI/CD platform could get triggered when the QA folks are done...)

dibsonstuff.com/help.html#we...

#slack #devops #deploy #staging #testing #queuing

Does a Slack app even need an origin story?

This short article goes into the rationale behind the creation of Dibs On Stuff: the little Slack app with PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWER ❤️🧞

dibsonstuff.com/story.html

#slack #devops #deploy #staging #testing #queueing