Automatically joined chat channels

Feature
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Continuing the discussion from Introducing Discourse Chat (BETA):

A repeat request we have had from @Alon1 / @jimkleiber and @Kim_Hanchet is some sort of facility for “auto join” channels.

The idea is that you want users not to start from a blank state in chat.

I can think of a few ways of doing this

  • A flag on a channel saying “auto joined” meaning anyone with access is automatically joined. (set by admins / moderators)

    • When ticked you mass join people to the channel
    • When unticked … auto joined people are removed (meaning we need a auto join flag per user or something)

  • A site setting listing the channels that are automatically joined

    • Same problem as above - need to deal with changed states and history.

Curious what the precedent is in other chat platforms.

@j.jaffeux any thoughts here?

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Thinking out loud, but one concept I would find interesting is to link this to groups.

On each chat channel you would have an auto_joined_by_groups option and essentially when a user is created or joining a group we look for associated channels.

I like that it allows to create a custom start experience based on group and also that it will automatically hint to interesting channels when you join a new group.

AFAIK, other platforms tend to just make you join everything you can interact with.

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Yeah in most your always auto joined and then you leave if you don’t want to be part of it. interesting idea to link to specific groups, but I wonder should it be another chat option?

Create chat channel options wold be:

Topic
Group
Category

For sure the feedback we have had so far is that it’s weird to have to go and find chat channels to join them. Chat is instant and let’s go.

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I agree.
No need to maintain history to “un-join” everyone.
Anyone who wishes to do so, could either mute or just leave a channel.
However, I would of course make auto-join an administrator thing and not allow every user to spam channels on everyone else.

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For sure a setting to allow channels to be only created only by certain groups and with who can setup auto join as another setting

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chat with password, please

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I just launched Chat in my community. And I thought that the “chat default channel id” setting auto-joined people to that channel. It doesn’t though and I had a moment of terror when I realized that wasn’t happening :grimacing:

I’d love to see even a simple version of this that has a site-wide “default channel”.

Edit: Conversely, it would be helpful to be able to see how many people have joined a specific channel, so I can understand what the reach of posting there is.

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Just wanted to share that we are working on this.

Thanks for calling out that point of confusion!

Yeah, it’s likely that we’ll start with something like this, though we haven’t gotten to it yet, and group-based defaults may come into play.

There are a variety of other things we may consider in the general space of “channel discoverability” as well.

Would love to hear about how things are going more broadly with chat in your community. Feel free to PM me or start a new topic if you’re open to sharing more.

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@Roman_Rizzi just added a feature that allows channels to be configured to automatically add people with access, and @j.jaffeux and @chapoi recently worked on adding an info panel that includes the ability to see who is in a channel, among other things.

Check out this topic that @rishabh put together about these changes for more info: 📣 Introducing default chat channels (automatically add users)

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