This is our first major update to Slack Forms since launching. Most users won't notice any major difference in features, but they should find the app much better to use.
We had reports of the Slack forms dashboard timing out while creating forms. Or just being generally slow to use.
There are a couple of reasons for this. Namely - Slack requires us to response within 3 seconds of most actions.
For most actions that's fine, but for things like form validation we need to validate your form fields, check if the keyword has been used, and check if it's been used in any other channel. This (plus the round trip it takes to receive Slack's message and send it back) occasionally meant it would take longer than 3 seconds. Which results in a time out error.
So in this update, we've re-done many of the back end processes to make them faster. In some cases, we've changed 2 requests to 1 or gotten rid of requests altogether.
We'll continue to monitor performance and make small improvements to this overtime!
Written by: Josh