I am looking for the ability to move entire discussions to either an existing or new topic. In an ideal world, I would be able to select one or more chat messages (same as posts in a topic) and choose to move them out of chat and name a new topic, or select an existing one.
I see there is a push for it to work this way, but this doesn’t work for us.
I do not want to preserve the initial type of conversation. Our single biggest issue is that users are leaning on chat to get ‘fast answers’ as opposed to using the forum as intended. We constantly have to remind users of this because of search, visibility for others to help, tagging, marked solutions, and so on.
We have done all of the propper expectation-setting up front, in the instance of our community, that chat is for regular, day-to-day conversation, but at least once a day there is a discussion that we have to message the user about to recreate in the forum.
Have you tried quoting them into a new or existing topic and then deleting the original chat messages?
Does that result in what you are looking for? Are you just looking for a way to streamline that process? Or is the result different from what you want in some way?
Yes, but quoting the user isn’t the same thing as converting their chat messages to topic posts, that are owned by them.
The only thing you could do today, which is incredibly cumbersome, is to create a new topic manually. Copy the text of each chat one by one, post that as a new message, change the ownership of the post to that user, and repeat for all chat messages you want to move to a topic.
It can take 30 minutes or more just to move one stream of chat over to a topic with posts.
Oh, I see. You want each chat message (or consecutive group of messages from the same author) to be its own post.
I understand better now what you’re asking for here.
Maybe it’s also worth starting a separate topic focused on the problem you’ve cited here:
I think it’s worthy of its own discussion too. Perhaps we all end up where you have already - that adding the ability to move messages is the next thing worth trying - but maybe we’ll come up with some other good ideas too.
I have some other topics somewhere (or support messages) about things like modal agreements over chat for newcomers, or global/channel chat banners. I think I also mentioned somewhere having them accept an agreement when writing a new chat message the first few times.