Not easy to know when inactive members not added to chat channel

[Jarjar]

Hi,

I have a forum subcategory with read, write, reply on it from a group I set.
From this forum subategory I made a chat channel (so with same permissions)

But when I @ this group in this chat channel, I have a message telling me:
”xxxx and 205 other users cannot access this channel and were not notified”

But they are all in the group I’m trying to tag and permissions are set properly. Why do I get this message? How can I make it work like intended?

Every help would be welcome, it’s a real problem for us at the moment.

[NateDhaliwal]

If I understand correctly, you have a category with permissions limited to a certain group, and a chat channel linked to that category?

If so, IIRC the chat channel is linked to the category, not the group.

You can enable auto-join for the group members to be added:

Introducing default chat channels (automatically add users)

Automatically add users to channel While creating a new channel, admins will now see a preference to add all new and existing users to it. Using this, admins can configure “default channels” for groups of users to be included in automatically. [image] For an existing channel, admins can toggle this behavior in Channel Settings. In all cases, a confirmation dialog will appear to indicate the number of users being added. Users auto-join a channel when: they are added to a …

[Jarjar]

Yeah the chat channel inherit of permissions on the category so it should be good.
I already have auto join on, still not all users are added to the channel like they should

[NateDhaliwal]

In the members tab, can I confirm that it is empty? If possible, could you send the Security tab of your category settings? Thanks.

[Jarjar]

Not empty but not all members of the group are in while they should all be.

[Jarjar]

It seems like it’s like this for all my chat channels, even though auto join is activated the most users I have is 198 in one of them while it should be above 500 easily.

Tried to disable and enable the auto join again, it doesn’t add more people to the chat channels.

I really don’t get why.

[Jagster (Jakke Lehtonen)]

I think it doesn’t add users who aren’t logged in to a forum recently. It add those users when they visit next time.

[tobiaseigen]

Hey Jarjar please be patient. You are using open source software and posting in a community support forum. Nate and Jakke are giving you good advice, for free!

I deleted that last post of yours because it did not contribute anything to the conversation and will not really make anyone feel motivated to help you.

Discourse Chat is designed to be used by members who are actively signing in. If you want to lure people back to your site who have not logged in for a while, the appropriate place for that is in an announcements category you have set up so everyone is watching it by default.

More specifically, from the doc Nate links to:

@Roman

It has to be active, as their email is confirmed, but it also means they visited the site at least once in the last three months (we check their last_seen_at attribute for this).

[Jarjar]

I had no complaints about their answers.

I just complained about how it behaves, sorry I used a word that was inappropriate to you, I offer you my sincere apologies.

Thank you for the quote. I guess we will have to find a workaround ourseleves to make it work like the other discussion app all good, at least now I finally know why I was getting this message.

Appreciate the help, have a good day

[tobiaseigen]

Thanks for your understanding, Jarjar! We do listen to feedback but we also appreciate patience and civility!

There are some nuggets of feedback here for the team to consider.

• perhaps the UI around managing chat channel membership can be improved, so you see if people are not being added when yout hink they are being added
• the documentation topic 📣 Introducing default chat channels (automatically add users) doesn’t mention the conditions under which site members will not be added

[tobiaseigen]

I just tested this and the UI is actually pretty clear. You know that users who have not been seen in three months will not be added.

[Jarjar]

It shows on channel creation but not after hence why I had no idea. Been a while that our chat channels exist already.

While we’re on it, it would be nice to be able to change the category the channel is linked to after channel creation if for example we completely change the forum structure and don’t want to loose the content from those chat channels.

[Moin]

Are all the users in the group allowed to use chat? By default, only users with trust level 1 and above are in Chat allowed groups. Did you add the group to that setting, or do all users in that group have a higher trust level anyway?

Here is what I did for testing and my results:

1. Set chat allowed groups to TL2
2. Create a new group with some members
3. Create a category limited to that group
4. Create a chat channel for that category with auto adding disabled
5. Add myself and one other user to the channel
6. @mention the group
   Result: Discourse told me that 18 users haven’t joined the channel and 13 cannot access the chat. (18+13 = 31. My test group has 33 members with me using the @mention and the user I added being notified Discourse seems to know what happened to each notification)
   
   
7. Then I enabled auto joining. 8 users were added to the chat, so now there were 10 users in there
8. I @mentioned the group again
   Result: Fewer members weren’t notified because they didn’t join the channel. Those 10 who still weren’t notified because they didn’t join the channel are the ones that didn’t visit the forum recently but had TL2. The ones below TL2 are covered by the second message about users who cannot access the channel. This is a bit misleading because it’s not about “this channel” which indicates it’s a permission error related to the channel or category, but it’s about them not being allowed to use chat in general.
   
   

The error message in the first post of this topic doesn’t match the one related to inactive members but the one about users not allowed to use chat. I am not sure the reason mentioned in the new title of this topic is correct for the problem of the OP.

[Jarjar]

All the users I’m tryin to add are per default lvl2 that they are getting with specific roles from our backend.

I even tried adding lvl1, it doesn’t put more people in the chat channels, I checked on the user that wasn’t tag on top of the 205 from my message, he is in the proper group and connected to the forum 71 days ago so he should definitely be in here and be notified. I definitely don’t understand what’s going on

I just want to be able to @ a group so it will tag everyone from the group, no matter their last connection or I don’t know what is going on, like on Discord.

Thank you for taking the time to try to find out, I really appreciate.