Chat vs Messages

Forgive my silly questions - we’re in the process of upgrading our very old (pre-Chat-as-Core) install to the latest version. We’re trying to figure out if we want to activate Chat.

  • What’s the difference/pros-cons between Chat and Messages?

  • We have turned off ‘Enable public channels based on categories.’ yet the Chat popup defaults to the ‘Channels’ tab rather than DMs - is there a way to hide the Channels tab?

  • Is there a way to migrate Messages into Chats/DMs so communications are all in one place?

  • With messages there’s different inboxes/folders based on how i’m being contacted (directly - or because i’m part of a group) - Does Chat have a similar way of showing the difference?

Thanks

From what I understand from doing some searches here on Meta, chat and messages are unrelated. You can imagine a personal message as a normal topic that’s searchable, albeit ‘private’ and permanent [1]. However, a chat is for more ephemeral discussions as in the site settings you can change the retention period of the chats.

A good place to look at other details is in topics like the one below

It depends what type of community you have whether you’d benefit from only chat, messages or both.

You can do this with CSS.


I’m not sure about your third question


I don’t use chat much myself but I think that under the DMs tab it combines individual chats and group chat notifications - not showing the difference. Someone can correct me here.


  1. unless deleted of course ↩︎

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Completely agree that this is a problem for sites where Channels are much less important.

I’ve reported this as a UX suggestion:

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Thanks for your help guys

Sounds like the two areas are doing the same thing - allowing members to communicate - in similar but different ways.

Looks like we’ll turn it off for now - and revisit it if/when the two messaging methods are merged.

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I don’t think they will ever be merged – they serve very different purposes. Chat is ephemeral and is used to have quick discussions with people. PMs are permanent and are therefore used for private discussions that may need to be revisited in the future.

I agree that for many communities, chat simply isn’t necessary and can be turned off. For others (like internal communities) it is important.

No because that wouldn’t make a lot of sense. It makes more sense to go the other way (which is possible).

Yes – you can see that the third one in my list is a group chat.

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In my opinion, the one key change needed to make this work really well would be for PMs to be treated as Private Topics (rather than messages) for those sites who have chat enabled.

This would retain the existing (excellent) functionality, but be cleaner, simpler, and more effective due to removing the big fat silo between PMs and Topics. It would also remove the confusion between DMs and PMs.

How might this look?

  1. A dedicated category called Private Topics which each user watches by default
  2. Populated with all of the PMs/Private Topics a user can see (i.e. basically their current inbox latest + sent combined)
  3. Filterable by users/groups
  4. These topics appear in the /Latest list and are included in search
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Correct. The only difference would be that a private DM shows the avatar of the other user, a group DM will have a number showing the amount of participants.

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@nathank I reckon this is worth a new topic. Want me to split it out?

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