Chat overview
Chat gives your club conversations in the places they belong: on a session, on an event, and in channels with their own member list.
Chat gives your members somewhere to talk inside ClubPal, attached to the thing they are talking about. A question about Thursday's training goes on Thursday's session, not into a group message nobody can find again. A committee has its own room, open only to the committee.
There are three places a conversation can live:
| Where | Who can see it | Set up by |
|---|---|---|
| A session | Anyone who can see the session | Turning session chat on |
| An event | Anyone who can see the event | Turning event chat on |
| A channel | Only the members a channel is sourced from | Creating a channel |
Turn chat on
Chat is off until you turn it on. Go to Admin > Chat > Settings.
- Enable Session Chat? puts a conversation on every session's details page.
- Enable Event Chat? puts one on every event's details page.
- Enable Channels? turns on channels. Until this is on, no channel is reachable by anybody, however it is set up.
The switches are independent, so you can run channels for your committee without opening up every session, or the other way around. Turning a switch back off hides those conversations without deleting anything: turn it on again and the history is still there.
You need the Manage Chats permission to reach any of the chat admin pages. See Permissions.
Where members find their chats
My chats at /chat lists every conversation a member is part of, with the unread ones marked.
Session and event conversations also appear on the session or event itself, so a member who is already looking at Thursday's training does not have to go anywhere else to ask about it.
How a member ends up in a conversation
Nobody has to join anything by hand.
- A session or event conversation is open to everyone who can already see that session or event. Members are followed into it automatically when they book, when they are assigned to coach it, or the first time they post.
- A channel is not open. Its members are whoever the channel is sourced from, and that is recomputed every time somebody opens it. Add a member to a sourced group and they have the channel on their next page load. Take them out and the channel and its history go with them.
See Using chat for what a member can do once they are in one, and Notification preferences for how they control what reaches them.
A note on what chat is not
Chat is for conversation, not for announcements you need people to read. It carries no delivery guarantee and no read receipt. When something matters, send an email.
See also
- Channels: create a chat room with its own member list
- Using chat: posting, replies, reactions and attachments
- Moderating chat: reported messages and what to do about them
- Notification preferences: what reaches a member and how
- Groups: the cohorts a channel draws its members from