Evan, was this the path forward, or did you have something else in mind for managing which rooms get shortcuts. Trying to keep things simple with this idea. Might fool around and see if I can implement it.

This looks awesome. The icon in pinned conpherences is participant/project icon, right?

I'd like to start using icons in Conpherence with the title to denote audience like we do for general Policy. I don't think we need to introduce any new concepts.

Bob Trahan
(Access is individual users)

Photos Team
(Access is Members of... )

Engineering Social
(R/W Access is anyone registered)

Public Support
(Read Access is Public, Write Access is anyone registered)

So in sample

instead of selected Icon it would be

Phacility

Or did I misunderstood?

The briefcase icon indicates audience, the name, is the name, and the icon with the blue halo is the icon. These three will all change together.

Ooooh. NOW I see it... That's even better than I thought.

I think this is like 80%-90% of what I wanted.

I'd like to try a more implicit implementation of the underlying rule first, where we just automatically push new activity into this bar rather than requiring you to pin things (like how most chat clients will just pop something up / light something up / bounce / ping / something like that when there's new activity), and then introduce pinning if/when that gets overwhelming. But I think the majority of the UI would be shared whether we stick with that rule, drop it and just do pinning, choose some combination, etc.

Basically, if I get a new private message, I want something to show up in the bar and flash at me in the base case (i.e., I haven't specifically ignored the thread, don't have 10 other things flashing already, etc), since that's the behavior I expect from a chat client. But overall I think we should just drive forward with this and then sort out the actual rules based on how they feel when the meat of it (i.e., clicking the buttons to switch threads) works.

The icons make sense to me, although "all users" vs "thread with several individuals" might be confusing. Without context, I'd think the "users" icon meant "private thread with 3+ participants". Not sure if there's a clean fix for that, though.