It’s really interesting that I have permissions to “move” other people’s chat messages to a topic. There’s no real downside I guess (chat message doesn’t disappear from chat), and certainly as an admin/mod I’d want to be able to do this. But is this intended to be possible for “regular users” too?
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That is an interesting question. Building upon that, is there a TL that a user would have to reach in order to move a chat message to a topic? Or is this limited to only Admins/Mods? If not, a lot of chat messages could become “duplicated” in a lot of topics in a hurry.
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I’d agree this should probably be an admin/mod only feature, but that’s @markvanlan and @erlend_sh’s call!
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Yep, this will be admin/mods only by default.
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I have to say, my first thought was the same - that it should not be enabled by default.
But after further consideration - it is quite a unique feature! Being able to easily save content outside of a quickly moving chat to discuss it further sounds great and, and least to me, sounds like a huge improvement of the typical way to achieve that in other messaging apps, which is typically done via pinned messages per channel.
I’m definitely excited about that.
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I’m starting to lean towards:
as long as it’s not destructive on the chat-end (moved messages are just folded away but not removed, so it’s easy to undo) it’s best to make it broadly available.
You can all feel free to play a little bit of a rascal and do some message moves that aren’t done entirely in good faith, and we can look at that together and ponder what the most suitable guard rails should be.
Maybe TL0 users need to get an approval for it, but from TL1 and up you’re expected to know the best practice and follow it as best you know how. It’s quite JIT-teachable.
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Yeah that part is handled by the same logic as core 
wont’ be an easy change I don’t think. I’m sure it’s possible though
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Would it be reasonable to allow high TL users/mods move everything everywhere, but allow TL1 users to move their own messages instead?
Overall only mods/high TL users are given authority over other people’s communications and it would be inconsistent to make an exclusion for chats.
EDIT: Because chat is synchronous, a permission to move own messages still allows 2 non-mod users to “replay”/crosspost a conversation to a topic—they just need to do it a message at a time.
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I think this feature should (if technically feasible) add the behavior of automatically merging multiple chat messages into one forum reply, assuming they’re by the same author and within a certain timeframe of each other.
People using chat (including myself) often write a stream of thought chunked into paragraphs, sentences, or even single clauses. This is slightly at odds with the best practice for a forum thread and probably wastes vertical space too.
Let me know if this behavior already exists.
I can confirm through testing that this is possible if you bulk-select messages from the same author then move to topic.
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What are thoughts around permissions when creating a topic from chat? I found that I could select a message in our private chat and create a topic anywhere, including public categories. I’m not sure this is the right call.
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I think it should match the same experience as personal messages; I just looked at the options for replies in my PMs here and the only thing I can do is delete them, rather than move them.
And I think that is a sensible, for how folks use personal messages and chat. 
I wanted to add that I have used ultimate magical moderator power to turn a personal message into a public topic, and in my community we use them to start Q&A type discussions (I’ll start an interview with someone, and after we have a more or less complete conversation we open it up for reading and comments from others). We used it so often I forgot that isn’t the default behavior; we did this before the draft categories were in. 
Looks like permissions have been tightened up, generally that’s good. I agree that not just anyone should be able to copy/move existing chat messages, but I do think anyone should be able to “Reply as linked topic” to a chat message, with an option that is probably like the current one: always available, i.e. something you can switch to easily after you begin composing a reply. I recall scenarios I’ve run into e.g. in Discord where I’ve started replying to someone’s chat message, and then it got really long, and I wished I could decide to just reply in a topic at that point. In some cases I’ve actually begun a forum topic in a related Discourse instance and gone back and linked my reply in the chat manually. 
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Maybe it should be limited to a maximum number of characters - like Twitter has. 
Of course any uploads/images should count toward a character count.
I’d never have a Twitter account because I’m long winded and I’d have at least 4 or more consecutive posts before I was done. Saying something in one or two sentences just isn’t me… unless I’m talking to my wife. 
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Agreed! People shouldn’t be able to move other users’ chat messages but they should be able to “quote” the chat message in a new or existing topic. This will allow users to naturally move the conversation over to long-form without having a power that they can abuse.
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I love this! I think it would also make sense to make it easy for people to see that it has been quoted from the chat so they can also choose to move to the topic and for the user who has been quoted to be tagged or notified that it happened.
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I would not be in favor of hard limits, but I definitely like “hinting” such as Discourse already does, e.g. “Your topic appears very similar to X, Y, Z”. So in this case “Your chat reply is more than 1000 characters. Maybe you want to reply in a Topic instead?”
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