title: How to Send Periodic Ephemeral ("Hidden") Messages From a Slack Bot
body: <p>I am interested in writing a Slack bot that will periodically send "ephemeral" messages to users.  Ephemeral messages are messages that appear within a channel, but can only be seen by a particular user, like the responses to bot "slash commands" (e.g. "/who").</p>
  
  <p>The goals here, however, are to have ephemeral messages sent periodically by the bot and:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>appear within the channel message stream (i.e. not in a
  DM/private message), and</li>
  <li>not in response to any slash command.</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>How do I use the APIs to create ephemeral messages like this?</p>