Time Boxed Chat

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Time Boxed Chat Discussion Summary

The discussion revolves around implementing a time-boxed feature for the chat room, allowing community managers to create events with a limited time frame. Frhaaaan suggests this feature would enable the creation of events and facilitate the transition of chat discussions into community discussions.

Canapin inquires about the scope of the timer and the fate of chat logs upon expiration. Frhaaaan clarifies that a channel-specific timer would suffice and proposes that the chat logs be preserved as a thread in the same or a different channel.

Jagster expresses support for the idea, while mcwumbly suggests experimenting with existing features to create a similar experience. mcwumbly outlines a step-by-step process for manually achieving a time-boxed chat, including creating a category, topic, and channel, and invites others to try it out and provide feedback. Frhaaaan appreciates the suggestion and is willing to explore this approach.

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Would be great if we could time-box the chat feature so the room is only available for a certain time. This will allow community managers to create events in their forums.

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+1 for this (added something to keep Discourse happy)

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Do you want to set a timer for the entire chat feature or for channels only?
What would happen when the timer reaches the end? Should the logs still be available to users?

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Channel-specific would be enough for my use case.

I think when the timer reaches an end, the whole would be available in the channel, or another channel, as a thread. It would also allow me to spin off certain chat discussions into community discussions to continue afterward.

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Have you experimented with doing this manually at all yet? Knowing now that works in practice would be helpful for designing built in features for this.

I could imagine doing something like with existing features:

  1. create a category for these kinds of channels that is associated with a group people can join freely to gain access
  2. create a topic in the category about the upcoming event
  3. at the desired time, create a channel I’m that category with auto-join enabled
  4. @group in the topic to let folks know the channel is open
  5. chat away in the channel
  6. Use the archive channel feature to capture the transcript in the topic.

If folks try that out or something like it I’d be interested to hear how it goes. What works well, what could be better, etc.

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I have not! Thanks for outlining these steps for me.

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