Slack "festive language" detector

Early in my career, I worked at small companies. We had Christmas parties and did gift exchanges with our team. It was fun.

Since moving to primarily remote work at a larger company, I’ve realized holiday parties aren’t super common and people don’t say Merry Christmas.

On one hand, I understand this because some celebrate other holidays like Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, and more. Typical greetings are abstracted to terms like “happy holidays” because it doesn’t leave anyone out. This is a divisive topic and I don’t have a dog in this fight, but I think it’s funny how intense of an issue it’s become for some.

This got me thinking… what if Slackbot had a feature to detect the use of banned “seasonal language”? It could fire violators, or at the very least give them some sort of warning. This could get ugly fast if it was real.

Whatever you are celebrating today, I hope you make some great memories with the people you love.

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