channels.join is not allowed for bot users. I would like my RTM-using bot to listen to channels other than the one listed in the bot integration page.
I don't see a way to change the channels in the bot integration page:
Is this just a limitation of bots or am I missing something fundamental here?
I had the same issue and wasnt sure why my bot was only listening to certain channels.
Your bot will need to be invited to each channel by a user. Run this command within the required channel in the Slack app to do so
/invite @<your_bot_name>
Once in the channel they should then be able to listen to events.
This is still a limitation of bots as of May 2017 because of a bug that it introduces-- see paulhammod's answer at https://github.com/slackapi/node-slack-sdk/issues/26. The correct way to add a bot is the the slash command /invite @<bot.user> <channel_name> as @MattGifford pointed out.
However, @nafg introduced an interesting workaround. If you generate a personal API_TOKEN for your account, then you can use it to invite a bot. For instance, in python one could run:
import slackclient
sc = slackclient.SlackClient(<PERSONAL_API_TOKEN>)
sc.api_call('channels.invite', channel=<channel_id>, user=<user_id>)
This will invite the bot to the channel. If you wanted to automate inviting your bot to new channels, you can look at event listeners in the API found at https://api.slack.com/rtm
As long as you allow your API_TOKEN to be used for that purpose, it seems that it would work as needed, albeit less convenient.
I haven't actually tried this but I would expect that you can first call channels.join on behalf of an actual user (e.g., yourself), then call channels.invite as that user to add the bot to that channel. I expect that is allowed, and it would then allow the bot to interact with that channel. This way you can automate everything.
