A user can have one of two possible presence values, active or away. A user
is active if they have at least one client connected to Slack, and they are not
marked as "away". There are two ways a user can be marked as away: automatic
and manual.
The Slack message servers will automatically detect activity based on messages sent from a client. If they detect no messages in 30 minutes, the user is marked as automatically away.
However, it's possible to actively use a Slack client without causing any
messages to be sent; in these situations the client can indicate activity has
occured by calling the API. Every Slack API method accepts an additional
set_active argument. This can be used to indicate activity has occured while
performing the requested action.
If the user's activity generates no API calls then the client can periodically call users.setActive to let the Slack servers know about that activity.
These auto-away rules do not apply to Bot Users.
An application can call users.setPresence
to manually mark a user as away or active. A manual status set using this
method will persist between connections.
A manual away status set using this method overrides the automatic presence
determined by the message server. A manual active presence set using this
method indicates that the automatic status should be used instead.
When using the Real Time Messaging API the initial call to rtm.start will include the current presence value for every member of your team. If their presence value changes a presence_change event event will be sent.
When using our Web API, you can call the users.getPresence method to get the user's current presence value.