The discussion centers on implementing an “auto join” feature for Discourse Chat, allowing users to be automatically added to specific channels upon access or group membership, rather than starting from a blank state. sam initiated the thread, referencing requests from Alon1, jimkleiber, and Kim_Hanchet. Suggestions include flagging channels as “auto joined” or linking auto-join behavior to user groups — a concept proposed by j.jaffeux, who noted it enables personalized onboarding. Kim_Hanchet and Alon1 favored a simpler model: auto-join all accessible channels, with users opting out by leaving or muting. Alon1 emphasized restricting auto-join to admins to prevent spam. alehandrof expressed confusion over the non-functional “chat default channel id” setting and advocated for a site-wide default channel, also requesting visibility into channel membership for reach analysis. mcwumbly confirmed work is underway, noting group-based defaults may follow. Later, mcwumbly announced the feature’s completion: channels can now be configured to auto-add users, and an info panel shows channel membership — detailed in this topic.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
@Roman 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.
