Can I grant an ordinary user the right to create a public channel on Chat?

[Programer-D]

As the title says, I would like to authorize general users to open public channels as my community is closed and trustworthy users.

However, I am having trouble finding such a section in the settings. Is this impossible?

[mcwumbly (Dave McClure)]

This is not currently possible.

Currently the feature is only available to staff. If we were to expand that in the future, it’d probably be via a site setting to allow additional groups to create or edit channels.

[Programer-D]

Thanks for the response.

I see… I will hope that it will be implemented.

[AGeneral (Andrew Goldberg)]

I would love this feature! We are also part of a very large closed discourse community where we wouldn’t mind certain trust levels creating chats.

[mcwumbly (Dave McClure)]

There’s some ongoing discussion about adding a site setting like chat_create_channel_groups to enable this permission to be delegated more widely.

One question that has come up which we’ve yet to answer is who should be able to edit channels? Should anyone in those groups be able to edit any channel? Or should editing a channel be restricted to the channel creator and staff? Or should we simultaneously add a channel based setting to configure which groups own the channel (and are allowed to edit it).

There are some other settings which we think may be best restricted to staff if we open this up, like “auto join”. Auto-join, in combindation with @here/@all might be best to lock down a bit more. I can imagine folks wanting to allow more groups to create channels, but not to easily allow them to add the whole community to the channel and @all them.

Do you have a sense of what combination of these options would be the best fit for your community @AGeneral?

[AGeneral (Andrew Goldberg)]

@mcwumbly

One question that has come up which we’ve yet to answer is who should be able to edit channels? Should anyone in those groups be able to edit any channel? Or should editing a channel be restricted to the channel creator and staff? Or should we simultaneously add a channel based setting to configure which groups own the channel (and are allowed to edit it).

If by edit you mean changing the channel name, deleting the channel, etc. I think that should be reserved to the channel creator and staff. I personally don’t see the chat feature as a place that needs close moderation like our threads do.

If you included a “chat_create_channel_groups”, how would that work mechanically? If someone wants to create a chat, they would request entry to that group? Or if someone pressed the create channel button, there could be a “you are not authorized to create a channel, would you like to request authorization?” message, and if the user presses “yes”, a moderator notification would be triggered with a “grant” or “deny option”. It would be great if we could auto-join users to this “chat_create_channel_groups” if someone is above a certain trust level (would be icing on the cake).

@mcwumbly

There are some other settings which we think may be best restricted to staff if we open this up, like “auto join”. Auto-join, in combindation with @here/@all might be best to lock down a bit more. I can imagine folks wanting to allow more groups to create channels, but not to easily allow them to add the whole community to the channel and @all them.

I agree completely.

[mcwumbly (Dave McClure)]

@AGeneral

It would be great if we could auto-join users to this “chat_create_channel_groups” if someone is above a certain trust level (would be icing on the cake).

There are built-in groups for trust levels, so it’d be pretty natural to add @trust_level_2 to the list of groups allowed to create channels, for example, and then this would “just work”.