I set up our first channel discussion today, and at least two members said they looked for the channel but couldn’t find it. My guess is they didn’t scroll far enough down the left hand sidebar to find it.
How do others publicize/promote/highlight an active channel discussion that is only going to be active or relevant for a few hours? Is there a way to feature it at the top when someone signs in?
Is there some kind of ‘happening now’ feature?
Is it possible they were on mobile? The sidebar is default closed on mobile, so that could be why they missed it if it were the only way to discover it.
Perhaps in this scenario a banner topic that links directly to the channel could work?
Alternatively, you could set up the channel to auto-join members and use @all or @here or @somegroup to let everyone know “It’s happening!” - but of course I would recommend an approach like that with extreme caution and awareness of what would or would not be appreciated by your community.
A sticky banner topic might work, I’ll have to try that next time.
One issue I see with using a sticky banner topic is that since it is a new topic/post it goes out via email, which for my site is relayed to the legacy Mailman mailing list for my community.
That’s OK if I want everybody on the legacy list to know about the chat, but something that ONLY appears to someone who logs in on the discourse site would have advantages in some situations.