Documentation

Quick Reference

Filter	Search for
syften	the word "syften", "Syften" or "SYFTEN" (case insensitive).
google apple	posts mentioning both of these companies.
"my podcast"	the phrase "my podcast".
site:reddit.com/r/startups/	posts on the /r/startups subreddit.
plug*	"plugin", "plugins", "plug"... The star can only be placed at the end.
"good plug*"	same as above, but for phrases.
beer NOT root	the word "beer", but not if "root" is also mentioned.
title:domain title:name	posts with a title that includes both "domain" and "name".
title:"domain name*"	posts with a title that includes the phrases "domain name", "domain names" etc.
`fmt.Printf("hi!")`	this exact string, without ignoring special characters. These are backticks, not apostrophes.
author:user1 author:user2	posts by user1 or user2.
replyto:someuser	replies to this user. Use in conjunction with `site:`. This doesn't work for all communities.
type:post	posts, i.e. the items that create new threads.
type:comment	comments, i.e. replies to posts.
tag:sometag	for use with multiple email addresses and Slack channels.
// blah blah blah	a comment.

The filter a.b.cwill match, among other things, the text "A... b!c". That's because special characters are ignored and word boundary logic is applied. This is what you would expect from a Google search.

However, Syften is not Google and does not need to instantly search thought terabytes of data. We're only filtering once, through live data, delivering the results and discarding the rest. This allows us some more CPU-heavy operations, like matching special characters. If you want to match special characters, like a text editor search would, surround your filter with backticks, like so: `a.b.c`.

Examples

Monitor broad keywords in specific communities

site:reddit.com/r/saas site:reddit.com/r/startups apple
site:slack.com google

See what interesting security topics show up on Hacker News (matches "security", "secure", "securing" etc.)

site:news.ycombinator.com title:secur*

See who's developing new Slack bots on Indie Hackers

site:indiehackers.com "slack bot"

Get mentions about Mailchimp but avoid utm-tagged links

mailchimp NOT `?utm_source=mailchimp`

Look for leads to pitch your Wordpress theme to, while excluding links to other themes

"wordpress theme*" `?` NOT `https://`

Site specific syntax

If you're interested in site specific filter syntax, please click the community name in the footer below, under "Communities". There you can learn how to filter out your messages in Slack for example, how often we check for new posts, or what limitations a particular community has.

We scan the entire Reddit with all of its subreddits.

Use Cases

Subreddit tracking

Limit the search to just one sub-reddit.

site:reddit.com/r/golang/ "go 2"

Find questions about a topic

Search the title of a post or comment for the keyword plugin and a question mark, in this one sub-reddit.

site:reddit.com/r/shopify/ title:plugin title:`?`

Track Reddit users

This includes comments and posts. Paid ads are just promoted posts, so you can track a marketing campaign as well.

site:reddit.com author:someuser123

Monitor Reddit posts

Limit the search to posts (new threads) only, and skip comments. The example below will notify about each new thread started on the r/saas subreddit.

site:reddit.com/r/saas/ type:post

Implementation Details

Alerts are available with an up to 1-minute delay.
Syften sees the content from the perspective of a logged-out user.
A comment's title is reconstructed from the slug in the URL and may be slightly different from the posts's title.
Item edits are not tracked.
Reddit ads are just promoted posts, meaning that you can track ad campains.
The replyto: operator is not supported.
During very high traffic periods there may be delays.

Resources

The Stack Exchange family of sites

We scan the entire Stack Exchange family of sites. Full list follows.

Use Cases

Get notified when someone mentions docker on Server Fault

site:serverfault.com docker

Get notified when someone replies to you

site:stackexchange.com replyto:yourusername

Implementation Details

Alerts are available with an up to 15-minute delay.
Only questions have a title.
Syften sees the content from the perspective of a logged-out user.

GitHub

Syften monitors all GitHub events that end in "*CommentEvent", so for example IssueCommentEvent, PullRequestReviewCommentEvent, etc.

Use Cases

Get notified when someone mentions a project

site:github.com someproject

Implementation Details

Syften scans GitHub every hour.

Indie Hackers

indiehackers.com is a website and community focusing on helping entrepreneurs become profitable while remaining independent.

Use Cases

Get notified when your friend posts something

site:indiehackers.com author:csallen

Get notified about people working on Slack bots

site:indiehackers.com "slack bot"

Get notified when someone does a Product Hunt launch

site:indiehackers.com title:"product hunt"

Get notified when someone replies to you

site:indiehackers.com replyto:yourusername

Implementation Details

Alerts are available with an up to 1-minute delay.
Comments don't have titles.
Item edits are not tracked.

Blogs

We have an RSS backend pulling in some blog articles. A list of all scanned news sites and blogs follows.

Implementation Details

Syften uses RSS to fetch new items. Some sites don't share full articles through this channel, only previews.
Alerts are available with an up to 15 minute delay.

Hacker News

news.ycombinator.com is a community-driven news site that allows users to submit links and create discussions. It focuses on startups and technology.

Use Cases

Get notified when a new official "Who is hiring?" thread gets created

site:ycombinator.com title:`Ask HN: Who is hiring?` author:whoishiring

Get notified when a new remote Go job is posted

site:ycombinator.com title:`Ask HN: Who is hiring?` remote go
site:ycombinator.com title:`Ask HN: Who is hiring?` remote golang

Get notified when someone from your team posts something

site:ycombinator.com author:user1 author:user2

Get notified about new GitHub Actions

site:ycombinator.com title:"show hn: " title:"github action"

Get notified when someone replies to you

site:ycombinator.com replyto:someuser

Implementation Details

Syften scans Hacker News using the official Hacker News API.
Syften sees the content from the perspective of a logged-out user, missing out on censored content.
Alerts are available with an up to 1-minute delay.
Only the story has a title (comments do not).
Item edits are not tracked.

Resources

Hacker News posting guide.

Dev.to

indiehackers.com is a website and community focusing on helping entrepreneurs become profitable while remaining independent.

Use Cases

Receive alerts whenever a thread is started or a comment is posted with the keywords you want to monitor.

site:dev.to yourproduct

Get notified when your favourite author posts something

site:dev.to author:favourite_author

Implementation Details

Alerts are available with an up to 1-minute delay.

Forums

We scrape an assorted selection of forums running on different backends. A list of all scanned forums follows.

Use Cases

Get notified about new Discourse paid jobs

site:meta.discourse.org title:`[paid-job]`

Get notified when your favourite developer posts something

site:discourse.brew.sh author:favourite_author

Implementation Details

Syften sees posts from the perspective of a logged-out user.

Resources

Finding your first few customers on forums (Zapier story).

Newsletters and mailing lists

Syften monitors some tech-related newsletters. A list of all scanned mailing lists follows.

Use Cases

Get notified when your friend posts something

site:indiehackers.com author:csallen

Implementation Details

Alerts are available with an up to 1-minute delay.

Podcasts

With the advent of powerful AI, we can now scan podcasts for mentions of your product.

Use Cases

Get notified when someone talks about your product

type:podcast syften

Implementation Details

Due to the nature of AI-generated audio-to-text conversion, the alerts are not as accurate as the other sources. This is especially true for non-dictionary startup names and domain names.
Alerts are available within 15 minutes of an episode being released, but this can vary with load.
Around 35,000 episodes are scanned each day.

Quora

indiehackers.com is a website and community focusing on helping entrepreneurs become profitable while remaining independent.

Use Cases

Listen for questions containing the keyword "seo tools"

site:quora.com type:question "seo tools"

Listen for answers containing your company name

site:quora.com type:answer syften

Implementation Details

Alerts are available with an up to 12 hour delay.
Edits are not tracked.
Due to the technical nature of Quora, some more advanced Syften filter expressions might not work (e.g. "*ession" will miss mentions of "expression" on Quora).

Slack Communities

We monitor a wide variety of publicly available Slack communities. A list of all monitored Slack communities follows.

acquiredfm.slack.com
all-about-saas.slack.com
apache-iceberg.slack.com
apisyouwonthate.slack.com
backlinks.slack.com
bigseoreddit.slack.com
bundler.slack.com
citus-public.slack.com
cloud-native.slack.com
confluentcommunity.slack.com
continuous-testing.slack.com
creatorsofproducts.slack.com
crohacks.slack.com
cube-js.slack.com
dagster.slack.com
dataqualitycamp.slack.com
datatalks-club.slack.com
devopschat.slack.com
ecommercelabs.slack.com
ecommtalk.slack.com
getdbt.slack.com
gophers.slack.com
grafana.slack.com
growmance.slack.com
growthband.slack.com
growthhackersslack.slack.com
growthhackersunited.slack.com
intl-business.slack.com
itpoolparty.slack.com
kubernetes.slack.com
launch-chat.slack.com
linearcustomers.slack.com
locallyoptimistic.slack.com
macadmins.slack.com
marketer.slack.com
measure.slack.com
microconfconnect.slack.com
micrometer-metrics.slack.com
mindtheproduct.slack.com
mlops-community.slack.com
mspgeek.slack.com
mspvendor.slack.com
node-js.slack.com
o11y.slack.com
onlinegeniuses.slack.com
open-api.slack.com
openapi-generator.slack.com
ops-community.slack.com
phpchat.slack.com
pigeonhack.slack.com
platformengin-b0m7058.slack.com
port-community.slack.com
predrevplus.slack.com
prefect-community.slack.com
product-marketing-all.slack.com
product-school.slack.com
productled.slack.com
productledgrowth.slack.com
profitsociety.slack.com
pythondev.slack.com
rands-leadership.slack.com
revgenius.slack.com
revopscoop.slack.com
rubyonrails-link.slack.com
sales-enablement-all.slack.com
serialmarketers.slack.com
shopifypartners.slack.com
startupcpg.slack.com
superpathcommunity.slack.com
sylius-community.slack.com
techlondon.slack.com
techwellhub.slack.com
testautomationu.slack.com
theenablementsquad.slack.com
thehustleco.slack.com
theleaddeveloper.slack.com
themopros.slack.com
trinodb.slack.com
video-dev.slack.com

Use Cases

Limit search to Slack communities only

Syften can search Reddit, Twitter, and many other leading communities. To limit a filter to Slack only specify site:slack.com:

site:slack.com yourwebsite.com

Limit search to just this one Slack community

You can narrow down your search to individual communities

site:techlondon.slack.com freelance

Channel tracking

We put the channel name in what is normally the post title for other backends:

title:`#marketing` "cold call"

Track users

Unfortunately we can't easily tell what the "Username" (e.g. reginald) of a Slack user is and the "Display Name" (e.g. Reginald Terris) is optional and can easily be changed.

So to make identifying users reliable we put the User ID (e.g. U57JWU42T) in the title field. Additionally, to make it convenient to view, we put the "Username" in the author field.

site:techlondon.slack.com title:U57JWU42T
site:techlondon.slack.com author:reginald

Track replies to your messages

To track replies to your threads track your own Slack user. Keep in mind that the User ID will, and the Username may be different in every Slack community.

site:techlondon.slack.com title:U57JWU42T

Learn from the best

See how the best do their marketing and learn from them. To avoid tracking their username across the different communities you can just follow urls to their websites.

site:slack.com marketingexamples.com
site:slack.com saasmarketer.io

Implementation Details

Alerts are available with an up to 1-minute delay.
Since Slack messages have no title, we're constructing a faux one that looks like this:
message from someuser (U012ABCDEFG) in somecommunity.slack.com/#somechannel.
Item edits are tracked.
Thread replies are tracked.
The replyto: operator is not supported.
It's inconvenient to track a user across multiple Slack communities, as their username may be different.
The channel ID is included in the URL, and can be filtered with site: site:somecommunity.slack.com/archives/C12345678/

Twitter/X

Monitoring Twitter/X is completely separate from the other communities. We use the standard Twitter syntax, shown below. Syften does not support these operators: min_replies, min_faves, min_retweets.

Operator	Finds Tweets
watching now	containing both "watching" and "now". This is the default operator.
"happy hour"	containing the exact phrase "happy hour".
love OR hate	containing either "love" or "hate" (or both).
beer -root	containing "beer" but not "root".
#haiku	containing the hashtag "haiku".
from:NASA	sent from Twitter account "NASA".
to:NASA	reply to Twitter account "NASA".
@NASA	mentioning Twitter account "NASA".
puppy -is:retweet	containing "puppy", filtering out retweets.
puppy -is:reply	containing "puppy", filtering out replies.
puppy -is:quote	containing "puppy" filtering out Quote Tweets.
has:links, has:hashtags, has:mentions, has:media, has:images	self explanatory.
lang:en	this parameter restricts Tweets to the given language.
tag:yourtag	this is a special Syften-specific operator used to tag your filters.

Use Cases

Here is how I would search for relevant tweets in English about Syften that didn't come from me and didn't mention my Twitter/X handle:

syften -@syften_com -from:@syften_com lang:en

Implementation Details

Alerts are available with an up to 15-minute delay.
Syften does not support these operators: min_replies, min_faves, min_retweets.

Product Hunt

producthunt.com is a product promotion website.

Use Cases

Get notified when someone comments on your product

site:producthunt.com replyto:yourproduct

Implementation Details

Syften scans ProductHunt every five minutes.

Resources

How To Launch on Product Hunt Multiple Times.

Steemit

Syften scans Steemit using the official Steemit API.

Implementation details

Syften sees the content from the perspective of a logged-out user.
Alerts are available with an up to 5 minute delay.
Item edits are not tracked.

Lobste.rs

Syften scans Lobste.rs using the official Lobste.rs API.

Use Cases

Get notified when someone talks about OpenBSD

site:lobste.rs openbsd

Get notified when your favourite author posts something

site:lobste.rs author:favourite_author

Implementation Details

Syften sees the content from the perspective of a logged-out user.
Alerts are available with an up to 1-minute delay.
Comments have the same Title as the Story they're in.