Finding Stale Threads

What Are Stale Threads?

A thread is considered stale when it has been open with no new replies or updates for longer than your team's configured threshold. The default is 7 days, but admins can adjust this from the Dashboard Preferences page.

Stale threads often represent unresolved questions, forgotten action items, or discussions that reached a conclusion but were never formally closed. Surfacing them helps your team stay on top of open work.

Viewing Stale Threads

To see stale threads in the current channel, run:

Smithy responds with a private message listing up to 20 stale threads in the channel, sorted by most recently updated first. Each thread is shown with its subject and a clickable link that takes you directly to the thread in Slack.

If there are no stale threads in the channel, Smithy lets you know the channel is all caught up.

Filter Options

The thread list includes interactive buttons to help you narrow down the results:

• Show tags — toggles tag display inline with each thread. When enabled, tags appear as gray code badges next to the thread subject (e.g., tag1 tag2).
• Only show mine — filters the list to show only threads created by you.

Both buttons highlight blue when active. A separate Dismiss button closes the message when you're done.

Automatic Stale Notifications

Smithy also proactively notifies thread owners when their threads go stale. The thread creator receives a private message with a link to the thread and a suggestion to either add a reply if it's still active or close it out if it's resolved.

Each thread owner is notified only once, so these reminders stay helpful without becoming noisy.