Chats: Text Messaging and Notifications

Chats is the primary place to communicate with your colleagues and stay updated. It serves not only as a messenger, but also as your personal inbox for receiving notifications, requests, and alerts.

All Chats activities are organized into:

Conversation channels
Notification feeds
Direct messaging

Conversation channels

Channel is a group chat created for a specific group or to discuss specific topics. For example, a dedicated channel can be created for a team to collaborate.

Channels can be public or private. While public channels are open for all organization members, a private channel requires you to have a permission from its owner to join.

Notification feeds

Notification feeds are your personal read-only channels for receiving notifications about Space events that you find important. These feeds are only visible to you.

Space comes with a single default personal feed — #Spacebox. It is already pre-configured to receive the most relevant updates from various sources: meetings you participate in, issues you’re assigned to, absence and membership approvals, etc.

Your #Spacebox subscription preferences are customizable. You can unsubscribe from certain events and subscribe to different ones that you find more important.

In addition to #Spacebox, you can create as many personal feeds as you want. If you feel like you're getting too many notifications you can effectively track in a single feed, you may want to divide your notification flow among multiple feeds for easier processing and navigation. For example, you can create a separate feed named #Meetings and configure it to receive all your meetings invites and updates.

For detailed instructions on how to configure and add personal notification feeds refer to Notifications.

Navigate around Chats

The left-hand sidebar displays all your contacts — channels, feeds, people — arranging them by recent activity.

Use tabs on top of the sidebar to filter the contact list and show only contacts of a particular type:

For example, choose DMs to only display your direct message contacts:

Find a contact or channel

Press Ctrl+K and start typing the name of the member or channel you're looking for. Then select it from the drop-down list.

To see a list of all channels, just type in #.

Alternatively, to view all channels, click on top of the contact list and select Browse channels:

Find a message

You can perform a full text search across all channels or within a particular channel/conversation.

To start searching, press Ctrl+Shift+F and type in a word or a phrase.

By default, the scope of the search is limited to the channel or conversation you're currently in. For example, if you open the search while you're messaging another member in Chats, it will be set to search your messaging history with that member.

To search a particular channel or conversation

Open the channel or conversation you want to search.
Press Ctrl+Shift+F or click the search icon in the top right corner:
Type a word or a phrase into a search field and choose a relevant result.

To search all channels and conversations

Press Ctrl+Shift+F.
In the input field, delete your current scope and add Messages:
Type in a word or a phrase and pick a relevant result.

Quickly find all your mentions in one place

You can instantly find all conversations in which someone has mentioned you or your team.

Click on top of the contact list. All your personal and team mentions are listed here.
Click on a particular mention to navigate to the message:

To subscribe to a channel, open it and click . The channel will be added to your contact list and will display a flag to notify you of new unread messages.

To unsubscribe from a channel, open it and click . You will stop getting notifications and the channel will be removed from the list.

To configure notification preferences of a channel you're subscribed to, open it and click the small arrow on then choose the desired options:

To provide all channel participants with updates on certain events, you can have notifications about these events delivered to the channel.

For example, if you want to update everyone in the #Marketing channel on new issues created in the Marketing project, you can subscribe that channel to the Issue created event from that project.

Open the channel and click the Channel info icon:
Go to the Subscriptions tab and click Add subscription:
Give the subscription an informative name that would reflect its settings.
Choose the subject from the drop-down list. Subject is a category of events from a certain source, e.g. Absences, Blogs, Issues, etc.
Apply filters to narrow down the source to specific entities. For example, if your subject is Issues, you can choose a specific project to get updates from about issues.
Choose the events you want the channel to be notified about, e.g. Issue created.
Click Add.

Create and manage channels

Create a new channel

Click on top of the contact list and choose New channel:
Give the channel a name and description (optional).
Make the channel public or private.
- Private channels can be only accessed by its participants.
- Public channels are open to all organization members.
- Note that even though named public, channels are not exposed to general public. Only registered and logged organization members will be able to access Space channels.
Add subscribers (participants) to the channel (you can add people and teams). The channel will appear in the contact list of the people you add. If the channel is private, only subscribers will be able to view and access it.
Click Create to save your settings and create the channel.

Manage an existing channel

Find and open the channel.
Click to open the menu:
If you are subscribed to the channel, you can:
- Pin channel — pin the channel to the top of the contact list. (For yourself only, will not affect other people.)
- View Channel info — view channel subscribers, pinned messages, attached files.
If you are the channel owner (you created this channel):
- Rename channel — rename the channel.
- Archive channel — block sending new messages to the channel.
- Delete channel — permanently delete the channel.

Add subscribers to a channel

Find and open the channel.
Click the Subscribers icon to open the dialog:
Choose people or teams you want to add:

When you are adding a team, future team members will be added to the channel automatically.

Attach a file, image, video, or poll to your message

When typing a message, you can attach a file (including images and videos) or a poll to it:

Mention people to invite them to a discussion

When writing a message, type in @ and choose the person:

The person you mentioned will be notified and able to join the discussion.

Use Markdown

You can use Markdown when writing messages. See the supported Markdown syntax.

Message options

Hover over a posted message to:

Edit or delete the message (if it's yours)
Start a separate thread from the message.
Add the message to your To-Do List.
Start a separate thread from the message.
Add a reaction (emoji) to the message.

Hover over a posted message and click to:

Quote the message (copy it to the text field as a quote).
Copy a link to the message to send it someone.
Pin the message to quickly find it later. To view pinned messages, click the Pinned icon on top of the screen:
Create an issue from the message in the Issue Tracker.
Unsubscribe from replies. You won't be notified if someone replies to this message.

Last modified: 30 July 2021