Documents & Communication

Messages & Channels

Channels and direct messages give the club conversation somewhere to live besides a group text nobody can search and no new member is ever added to.

Where messages live

Messages sits in your own sidebar, and everything you can read is in one rail down the left under four headings: Channels, Direct messages, Front Office, and Instructors. Picking a row opens that conversation beside it. On a phone the rail and the conversation take turns, with a back arrow between them.

The unread count on the Messages icon covers all four at once, so one number tells you whether anything is waiting.

Channels

A channel is a named room, and it comes in two shapes: one everybody in the organization is in, or one holding a list of people you pick. There is no third option keyed to an access group, so a channel for the instructors is a picked list that somebody keeps current.

Creating a channel, renaming it, changing who is in it, and archiving it all take the Manage channels permission. Owners, administrators, and managers have it out of the box; staff and members do not. Posting takes nothing extra, so if a channel is on your rail you can write in it.

Anyone holding Manage channels sees every picked-list channel in the organization, including ones they were never added to. That is on purpose, so a channel cannot become a room nobody responsible can find. Direct messages are not covered by it and stay between the two people in them.

Archiving is how a channel ends. It asks you to confirm, it leaves the messages where they are, and you can restore it later. Nothing deletes a channel outright.

Direct messages

Member-to-member direct messages are off when an organization starts. Until somebody turns them on, a member can write to the front office and to their instructors, and to nobody else.

The switch is in Organization Settings, Messaging, reading “Members can message each other directly”, and seeing it takes the manage-settings permission. Turned on, any active member can open a direct message with any other active member of the same organization.

The switch is all or nothing, so a flight school where forty students barely know each other gets the same open messaging as a four-person partnership.

How messages behave

Chat is text-only, flat, and permanent:

• Messages are text only, with no attachments, up to about ten thousand characters each.
• Sent messages cannot be edited or deleted. What you send stays as you sent it.
• A channel is one flat run in the order things were said, with no threaded replies.
• Search finds conversations. The box above the rail filters channel and thread names and does not look inside what anyone wrote.
• A conversation opens on its most recent two hundred messages and does not scroll past them. Older messages are still stored, but are not reachable from the app.
• The iPhone app does not have messages yet; a phone browser gets you the same thing.

The front office and instructor threads

Front Office and Instructors on your rail are an older, separate feature and they behave differently. A member writes to the office, and the whole team sees it in Office Inbox, a shared queue in the organization sidebar that takes the manage-messages permission. Those threads do notify: a new member message is a notification event like any other, so it can reach staff by email.

Front office threads are for reaching your operation and get followed up. Channels and direct messages are for talking among yourselves and get read when somebody opens the app.

Announcements & Notificationsthe events that do send email and push, and who receives them.

Your own chat settings

The gear at the top of a conversation holds three preferences that belong to you rather than to your organization: whether Enter sends the message or starts a new line, whether the rail shows the last message under each name, and whether the rows sit compact. They follow your account, so setting them at the front desk sets them on your laptop too. The same menu links to your notification settings.

Channels get a second gear in the conversation header for renaming, changing who is in it, and archiving. Only holders of Manage channels see that one.

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