--- title: "Private Threads, Slack Integration, Template Composer Sneak Peek" date: 2024-02-16 number: 0173 url: https://railway.com/changelog/2024-02-16-private-threads --- # Private Threads, Slack Integration, Template Composer Sneak Peek The year is 2025. Your company is booming. You’ve just surpassed 1M daily active users and investors are showing up at your doorstep with handwritten notes, piles of cash, and banh mi sandwiches. You get a notification on your phone. It’s from AWS. They miss you. They know you switched over to Railway and now that you’ve hit 1M DAU, they want you back. But it’s too late for sandwiches and it’s too late for second chances. Your business is growing on Railway and there’s no looking back. *Ping! — *What’s this? Another notification. It’s a new Railway changelog. You open it up. “It’s Friday and you know what that means…” Nice. You kick off your shoes and settle in to read about some new features. Monday can’t come soon enough. ## Private Threads Pro users now have access to private threads! While the company is undergoing a crisis of naming things … [(What do we call our community page now?)](https://community.railway.app/) Ray found it fit to add a super nifty new feature. Imagine you have a feature request that depends on you disclosing private information about your existing deployment. Or imagine you don’t wanna announce to the world that you spend $250,000 on AWS. Well, you’re in luck! Private threads are here. We plan to roll this out to a variety of channels so that we can use these threads, aggregate the questions, and with your permission, make them public for common questions or make guides. [Image: Private threads are now available to Pro users through the help menu] ## Slack Connect Integration [Image: Now available — add a Slack channel to chat with Railway] We have a new way to connect with the Railway team! The chants of “Business! Business! Business!” have resumed from the revenue team and they grow ever louder. We have found that the more we talk to you, the user, the more you are happy. Kidding aside, we have had a Discord integration for some time on the platform and it was long past due time to add a Slack integration. We continue to offer pagers and [SLOs on Business Class](https://docs.railway.app/reference/support#business-class), but for certain teams who cross a certain adoption level, you will now see this option within the Team Settings page. Make sure that your email on Railway matches your company email as we will fire off invites to that attached email. *Keep in mind, however, that these channels are offered with no SLA on response time, We advise that all general support is done via Private Thread and Email.* There are a lot of under the hood improvements that we also put in place so the team can intervene at the right times. We should probably write a blogpost about this… ## Sneak Peak: Template Composer While the [Template Kickback Program](https://railway.app/open-source-kickback) has been [going brr](https://x.com/Railway/status/1755692184035295569?s=20), we’ve been hard at work improving the template creation flow — and today we wanted to give you a little sneak peak of where we’re headed. Internally we’ve introduced a new Template Composer to make it even easier to create new templates from one or more services and/or repos. The template composer will look a lot like the regular application canvas: [Image: The new template composer is similar to a blank canvas] From this state, it will be possible to add GitHub repos or Docker images or Volumes — as many services as you like. In this example let’s try adding a popular Docker image for a Jupyter Notebook. First we add the Docker image: [Video: Untitled] Then we add a volume for data: [Video: Untitled] Then we add a Postgres database: [Video: Untitled] …notice how we can stack primitives up here as much as we want? How cool is that? As we work on getting the template composer right, we hope that it will lead to substantially deeper and more complex templates. The feature isn’t available just yet for use, but will be soon. Watch this space and [give us your feedback on how we can improve the template creation feature.](https://community.railway.app/feedback/template-composer-b23b0fa0?q=template) ## Plugin Migration Reminder We’re going to keep reminding you until the plugin deprecation date that [The Future of Databases is Services](https://blog.railway.app/p/launch-01-next-gen-databases) and that we have a beautiful [Migration Guide](https://docs.railway.app/guides/database-migration-guide#migration-process) you should check out. We are deleting all legacy database plugins on [February 23, 2024](https://docs.railway.app/guides/database-migration-guide#migration-timeline), so please make sure to migrate before then. If you have any questions, please [join the discussions in the Community Forum](https://community.railway.app/db-migration). ## Fixes and Improvements - We updated [Nixpacks to v1.21.1](https://github.com/railwayapp/nixpacks/releases/tag/v1.21.1) - We made some small improvements to modals through the application - We fixed a couple of small issues with the preferences pane