We’re excited to announce our new chat search feature, which makes it possible to find past conversations in chat channels, group chats, and DMs.
Full chat search across all your channels
You can access full-chat search using the Search chat option in the sidebar. This will let you search across all channels that you can see (even those you haven’t yet joined), your group chats, and any DMs. This is most useful when you’re not sure where to look for a message about a particular topic.
Channel-specific search
When you’re in a specific channel, click the funnel icon to open search. This limits search to just the channel you’re viewing. This is handy when you know what channel the message you’re hunting for is in, since it will exclude results from outside the channel that might be off topic.
Notes
A few things to note!
- For now, chat search is distinct from topic search; these are two separate features. We hope one day to unify them into a single, full community search.
- Chat search can’t find messages that were deleted based on your
chat channel retention daysorchat DM retention dayssettings. - After updating to the latest version of Discourse, a background job will run to index your chat messages and make them available to search. Until this process is complete (which can take multiple days for communities with lots of chat messages), some messages may not show up in chat yet.
We hope this feature makes it easier for your community members to find past content — please give it a go and let us know what you think!