Conpherence currently has private threads, but there's significant interest and value in having rooms, like IRC. The major distinction for "rooms" is that they can be browsed, viewed, and joined by non-members.
This task outlines a reasonable technical implementation of rooms, although the last mile of product integration is intentionally left vague until we have better support elsewhere. Roughly:
- Add a flag to mark threads as rooms (T7583).
- Add policies for rooms (T7582).
- Add UI to browse and create rooms (T7584).
- Make other UI stuff work (T7585, T7586, etc).
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**Rough Spec:**
- Make separation of Rooms and Messages very clear, through features and UI treatments.
- Separate out Messages and Rooms in UI (sidebar list, new creation)
- Rooms use proper policy icon UI (public, all users, project, custom)
- Messages uses no icons, just @ symbol (or no icons). Side thought, remove title outright?
- Convert to Room seems helpful, but can wait on feedback (but we’d want it for Phacility I’m sure).
- How to mention a room? i.e. “Please join #phabricator_admins for questions like this.” (would love to use hashtags)
- Policy for who can create Rooms (i.e., we’d want to control that on `secure`)
- Policy for who can view Rooms (i.e., contractors cannot?)
- Messages only support people, not projects (i assume?)
- Rooms support only projects (i assume?)
- Rooms that are All Users or Public are findable/searchable
- Rooms that set Subscribers/Participlants (projects) are auto-added to those members Conpherences.
- Do Rooms get Moderators/Admins? Do for example we want to display differently in a #support channel
**Rough sidebar:**
**Recent Rooms** {icon search}
`#phacility`
`#engineering`
`#social`
`#support`
`#conpherence_v2`
… see more … (if more than 5)
**Recent Messages**
`@btrahan`
`@btrahan, @epriestley`
`@qgil`
`@pfung`
**Rough Create Dialogs**
**+ New Message**
- To
- Message
**+ New Room**
- Title
- Image
- Subscribers/Participants (To)
- Visible To
- Joinable By
**Sample Use Cases:**
- New Message
- To: btrahan, epriestley
- Message: “How about Lunch tomorrow”
//Outcome: Sends a message thread to btrahan and epriestley .//
- New Room
- Title: “Social”
- Subscribers: <left blank>
- Visible To: All Users
- Joinable By: All Users
//Outcome: Anyone with an account can find and join this Room.//
- New Room
- Title: “Phacility + Wikimedia”
- Subscribers: “Phacility” “Wikimedia”
- Visible To: Custom, Members of Phacility OR Members of Wikipedia
- Joinable By: No One
//Outcome: People in Phacility or Wikimedia projects automatically have this Room in Conpherence.//
- New Room
- Title: “Photos Team”
- Subscribers: “Photos”
- Visible To: Members of Photos Team
- Joinable By: No One
//Outcome: The Photos projects members automatically have this Room in Conpherence.//
- New Room
- Title: “Free Support”
- Subscribers: btrahan, epriestley, chad
- Visibile To: Public
- Joinable By: All Users
//Outcome: Bob, Evan, and Chad have the Room automatically added to their Conpherence. Anyone can find and view this Conpherence. Any User can join and participate. Joining / Subscribing / Participating all mean the same thing.//