The discussion revolves around making it easier to add people to channels through the chat UX in Discourse. Earnie_Baird highlights the gap in functionality compared to Slack, where moderators can easily add or remove members from channels. Earnie_Baird explains that in Discourse, moderators have to either DM users a hashtag to join a channel or instruct them to manually join, which can be cumbersome.
mcwumbly points out an existing channel configuration option to automatically join people to a channel, but Earnie_Baird notes that this may not be suitable for larger communities where not all members need to join a specific channel. Earnie_Baird suggests that allowing moderators to add people to channels, similar to Slack or Discord, would be a useful feature. mcwumbly acknowledges the limitation of the current functionality and agrees that Earnie_Baird’s idea has merit.
Moving from Slack to Discourse the other really big gap will be the ability for moderators to add people to public and private channels easily through the chat UX.
Ideally this would be something moderators could easily do by clicking on the channel name and adding/removing members as needed.
Hi Earnie! I moved your post into a new topic.
Can you share more about how your use case and what you are missing in Discourse that you currently have in slack?
Thanks for asking @tobiaseigen
In Slack when I spin up a channel for a new project I know the 5-10 people working on it so in the channel config I click on “Add People”, search for them and they are automatically added to the channel.
By contrast in Discourse there is no way to do this. I have to either DM everyone a hashtag for the channel to join or I need to tell them to manually join the channel themselves by browsing channels. In general we’ve found that discoverability of browsing/joining channels is not obvious to many users.
Since Slack is for work environments anyone can add anyone to a channel but since Discourse is more of a public setting and this would be ripe for abuse the ability to add people to channels should be limited to moderators.
–
There is a related problem where spinning up private channels based on private categories & group membership is very convoluted / not intuitive. Instead you should just be able to create a channel which is private and add members to it (which is something that both Slack and Discord support).
There is an channel configuration option to automatically join people to the channel.
See: 📣 Introducing default chat channels (automatically add users)
This adds everyone with access to the category a channel is associated with, so you have to be somewhat more intentional with your category/group/channel design.
The idea of simplifying things and removing the category indirection certainly comes up from time to time as well, and it may be something we revisit at some point too, but we don’t currently have any immediate plans to change that.
Hi @mcwumbly - when you have a community of hundreds (or thousands) of people it doesnt make sense to have them all join a channel that’s only relevant to 20 people.
We also use chat completely independently of forums/categories.
To the extent you’ve already built a chat/messaging product with channels & DMS that looks + feels a lot like Slack / Discord, it would make sense to let people use it in a similar way.
Just sharing what you can do today. It works well for some use cases, but not all.
I’m not debating whether your idea is a good one (I think it is!).