Chat is the private half of a community. The feed is people talking to everyone; chat is people talking to each other.
It is on by default. Everything about it sits in the Chat system tab of the community settings.
The switch
Enable Chat System controls the whole thing. While it is on, members find their conversations on the Messages page and can start one from another member's profile or from the member list.
Chat needs the community itself to be switched on and a paid plan. Without either, chat is unavailable no matter what the switch says.
When you switch it off, the Messages page tells members that chat is not available, and sending, reading and every other chat action is refused. Conversations are not deleted: they come back when you switch chat on again.
Two settings come with it, and both start fully open.
- Group chats, with Allow all members to create group chats.
- Allowed media types, with Images, Audio and Files.
Group chats: who may create them
With Allow all members to create group chats on, any member can start a group. Switched off, only admins and the account owner can, which the setting describes as "only admins can create group chats". Members can still take part in groups either way. Trainers, member managers and content managers count as members here: they cannot create groups while the setting is off.
The narrower setting is often the better start. Groups that anybody can create tend to multiply, and a member added to five groups they did not ask for turns notifications off entirely. Letting only admins create them keeps groups intentional: a cohort, a project, a live round.
You can widen this later. Narrowing it once members have made twenty groups is the awkward direction, because existing groups stay.
Who members can add to a group
A member can only add people who follow them or who have already written to them in a direct chat. To add anyone else, they write to that person first and wait for a reply.
The rule matches direct chats, where a member can send one message until the other person replies or follows back. Without it, a group would be a way around that limit.
Admins and the account owner can add any member. A block always wins, for them too: when one of two people has blocked the other, neither can add the other.
The member who created a group owns it. The owner can rename it, give it a photo, add and remove people and delete the group. Everyone else can leave. Changes like these appear in the conversation as short system messages, so nobody disappears from a group silently.
Media in messages
Allowed media types decides what members may attach in chat. It is separate from the media rules for posts.
- Images covers pictures.
- Audio covers audio files and voice messages.
- Files covers everything else, videos included. There is no separate video switch for chat.
A community that shares work in progress needs images. A community talking about schedules may not need files at all, and switching them off saves storage and the awkward conversation about what was uploaded. Text, emoji, GIFs and reactions are always available.
What members control themselves
Members can look after their own inbox without your help. In each conversation they can Mute notifications, Archive chat to move it out of the list, and Delete chat, which removes it for them only; the other person keeps it.
In a direct chat they can block the other person with Block user. A blocked person can no longer send them messages or add them to a group. Blocking is lifted from the blocked person's community profile with Unblock. Groups cannot be blocked, only left with Leave group.
Members who are away get an email when a new message arrives: anyone who has not been active for five minutes, at most once a day for each person writing to them. Muting a conversation silences its push notifications.
What chat is not
It is not a support inbox. Messages between members are between members, and your team has no view of every conversation.
Reports are the exception. A member can Report a direct chat or a group. The report lands in the moderation queue with the reason Inappropriate content, and your team can then open View chat history and read the whole thread: for a direct chat, everything with the reported person, for a group, the group. A member can report a conversation again after an earlier report was dismissed.
If you want members to reach you, give them a forum for it, or a channel outside the community entirely.
Moderation
Chat reports can only be read and dismissed with Dismiss reports. Your team cannot delete or hide chat messages, and muting a member in the community does not stop them from chatting.
Moderation: requests and reports
The rest of the answer is at the member level. The person being harassed can block, and someone who is a problem in chat is usually a problem elsewhere: deactivating or banning the account closes every door at once.
Whether to leave it on
Chat suits a community where members have reasons to talk privately: cohorts, mastermind groups, anything with pairs or teams.
It suits a large open community less. Conversations that would have been useful in a forum, where the next person could find them, move into private threads where they are lost. A quiet feed and a busy chat is usually a sign the feed needed the attention.
Switching chat off is not destructive, but members notice. Conversations they were in the middle of become unreachable until you switch it back on, so it is better decided once than toggled.