So you wanna remove @growbot?

So you’ve added the Growbot Slack bot to your team because it seems like a good idea. It can be. And it can be really annoying. Once you’ve added it to a channel, it’s not immediately obvious how to remove it. Searching Google turned up nothing, so once I finally figured out how to do it I figured I should share it.

First, you have to determine what @growbot’s real username is. It’s using part of the Slack API that allows it to appear in the channel but not be a real member. To figure out what its user name is, you have to offer props to someone. Here’s what I posted:

tswicegood> props to @growbot for being indispensable – literally, I can't dispense with you

From there, Growbot will go “aww shucks” on you and should post a reaction to your post along with something to the channel attributed to “Growbot”. Ignore the post, but hover over the reaction. You’ll notice a username like @U4X4G45KJ – that’s what you need.

Now that you have the username, use the /remove command to remove Growbot.

tswicegood> /remove @U4X4G45KJ

Replace the @U4… part of that message with the username that you found for your Growbot.

You won’t see anything happen, but when you try to give someone props via one of the keywords like “props to @jeff” or “thanks @chris” you’ll note that Growbot doesn’t respond.

Be careful, using the /props command will invite @growbot right back. I couldn’t /remove it again until I tricked him into reacting to my post and got its generated username.