Messages

A community page has a Send a message button. Press it and you get a conversation with that community: you write as yourself, and the community writes back as itself.

The Messages screen

All of your conversations live on the Messages screen. On a computer, reach it from the message bubble beside the notification bell at the top right; when something is unread, a mark appears on the bubble. On a phone, tap your avatar at the top right and choose Messages from its menu.

The conversation list sits on the left and the one you open on the right; opening a conversation does not make the list disappear, so you never have to go back to reach the next one. On a phone the conversation opens full screen, and Messages takes you back to the list.

Three kinds of conversation share the list, newest first:

• Communities you have written to. Shown with the community's logo.
• People writing to communities you run. If you run a community, the people who write to it are here too. The small logo on the corner of their photo shows which of your communities they wrote to.
• Your Huddin chats. People you message one to one on Huddin are listed with the Huddin mark on the corner. Press one and the conversation opens on Huddin.

Opening a conversation clears its unread count.

Writing to a community

Open the community's page and press Send a message. Or press the + button beside the heading on the Messages screen: the New message window that opens offers a few popular communities straight away, and you can search for any other by name.

You always have one conversation per community, not a new one each time. Come back a week later, press the button again, and you land in the same thread with everything you said before still there.

The community's replies arrive under its name and logo. Whoever on their team typed the reply is not shown to you — you are talking to the community, not to a particular person on it.

Finding a conversation

Once you have more than four conversations, a search box and filters appear at the top of the list. Search conversations looks at both the person's or community's name and the last message, so you can find a conversation you cannot name with a word like "tickets". The filters split the list into All, DM (your Huddin chats), Communities (communities you have written to), and What I manage (people writing to communities you run). A filter with no conversations in it is not shown.

Reading what people write to your community

Messages to your community show up in two places: on your own Messages screen alongside your other conversations, and in the admin panel under Inbox in the Communication group, for that community alone.

When you reply to one, your reply goes out with the community's name and logo on it, not yours. A line at the very start of the conversation reminds you, such as "You are replying as Kadıköy Software." There is one exception: if you wrote to a community you run yourself, that conversation is your own conversation with the community, and there you write under your own name.

The inbox is shared. Every admin of the community sees the same list, the same conversations, and each other's replies. Read state is shared too: when one of you opens a conversation, it counts as read for all of you, and the rest stop being reminded about it.

Inside a conversation, a reply written for the community carries a small note saying who wrote it: written by you on your own replies, written by an admin on the rest of your team's. Only your team sees that note. It exists so a team can keep track of itself, not to undo the fact that the community speaks with one voice.

Being told about new messages

When a message goes unread for a while, we send an email — to you if a community wrote, or to every admin if somebody wrote to your community. It says who wrote and how many messages are waiting, and it does not include the message text: email cannot be recalled, and a message shown there would sit in an inbox nobody controls forever.

The reminder stops as soon as the messages are read. In a community inbox, one admin reading is enough for everybody.