Chat & DMs
Real-time conversation, organized into community channels for the whole neighborhood and one-to-one direct messages for private exchanges between two residents.
On this page
Two tabs: Community and Direct
The chat page has two tabs at the top. Community shows the shared channels every approved resident can read; Direct shows your private one-on-one conversations with other residents. The URL keeps the tab and the selected channel in sync, so you can deep-link to either side from anywhere in the app.
How channels are organized
Channels are grouped in the left rail. The default groups are Management (board and management channels), Committees (one per committee that has a linked discussion channel), Amenities (one per amenity an admin has given a channel to, so questions about the pool land somewhere obvious), Residents (the general community channels), Polls (per-poll discussion channels created when an admin checks the box on a new poll), and Archived (read-only channels that are out of rotation). Admins can rename or reorder these groups in Setup.
A search box sits above both tabs. See Searching your chat history below for what it finds. Admins also see a + button beside it to add a channel on the spot: give it a name, pick a category (or choose + New category to start a fresh one), and it appears in the rail. Set its icon, color, and who can see it afterward with the pencil that shows on hover.
Most channels are open to every approved resident. Some are scoped: board channels are visible to board members only, management channels to admins, and a committee channel is visible to the residents who belong to that committee. Sidebar membership reflects what you have access to, not the full set.
Channels attached to something
Some channels belong to something else in the community: an amenity, a committee, or a poll. Those show a small link in the channel header naming what they belong to, so you can go from #pool to the pool’s hours and rules in one click, or from a poll’s discussion straight to the vote itself.
The link is also the quickest way to tell what a channel actually is. Without it, the only clue that #pool is about the pool rather than a channel someone named that way is which group it happens to sit in.
Searching your chat history
The search box above the tabs looks in three places at once: channel names, the people you can message, and the text of messages themselves. It ignores which tab you are on, so a search started from Direct still finds a channel post from last spring.
Results come back in two groups. Jump to lists channels and people matching by name, the same way the old box worked. Messages lists matching message text, newest first, grouped by day, with a tag showing which channel or conversation each one came from. Message search starts once you have typed three characters. Below the box, All / Community / Direct chips narrow the results and show how many hits are in each.
Click a message result and the conversation opens at that exact message, with the surrounding messages loaded around it and the match briefly highlighted, even if it is months old. The results stay on screen so you can work down the list without retyping, and a Jump to latest button brings you back to the present. Arrow keys move through the results, Enter opens one, and Esc clears the box. Your last five searches are remembered on that device and appear when the box is empty.
Posting a message
The composer at the bottom of every channel accepts plain text plus three optional attachments: a GIF (chosen from the in-app GIF picker, which searches Klipy), a photo (uploaded to private storage and rendered via a signed URL), or an emoji picked from the standard emoji panel. You can use any combination of those on the same message.
One thing worth knowing about GIFs: the picker searches Klipy, an outside service, so what you type there is sent to them. A posted GIF is also delivered from Klipy rather than stored with us, which means Klipy can see the IP addresses of residents who view that message. Photos work differently: those are uploaded to your community’s own private storage. Emoji are rendered from an image set and send nothing about you.
Press Enter to send. Shift+Enter inserts a newline. Photos and GIFs send the moment they’re selected. There’s no separate confirm step.
Mentioning a neighbor
Type @ and start a name to open the mention picker, then pick a neighbor from the list. The mention shows as a name chip in your message, and clicking a chip opens that neighbor’s profile popup. In a community channel the people you mention get a notification, unless they turned mentions off in their notification preferences. In a direct message a mention is only a link to the person; nobody is notified.
You can add mentions while editing a message too. The edit field shows existing mentions as chips and has the same picker. Saving an edit notifies only the people you newly mentioned, so correcting a typo never pings anyone a second time.
The picker only lists neighbors who can read the channel. Anyone you have blocked, or who has blocked you, never appears in it.
Replies and reactions
Hover any message to reveal its toolbar. The reply icon quotes the message in your composer and sends your reply as a child of the original; the quoted preview shows above your message so the context is visible without scrolling. The smile icon opens an emoji picker for reactions. Reactions group by emoji and show the count; clicking your own reaction removes it; clicking someone else’s adds yours next to theirs.
New messages, edits, deletes, and reactions all stream in over realtime, so you don’t need to refresh to see what others are doing.
Editing and deleting your own messages
You can edit or delete any message you sent. Edited messages render with a small (edited) tag. Deletes are soft: the message body is cleared and the row is flagged as deleted, so replies that quoted it still render a “message deleted” placeholder rather than vanishing. Admins can delete anyone’s message; the same soft-delete applies.
Unread counts and read receipts
Each channel in the sidebar carries an unread count. The count is the number of messages posted after your last visit to that channel. Opening the channel writes a read-receipt timestamp for you, which clears the badge and becomes the floor for the next round of unread counting.
DMs use the same mechanism: each conversation in the Direct tab shows an unread count when the other person has sent something since you last looked.
Direct messages
DMs are strictly one-to-one. Group DMs aren’t a thing. To start a conversation, click another resident’s avatar or name anywhere in the app, then pick Message from the profile popup. If a DM channel between the two of you already exists you’ll land in it; if not, one is created and you land in it. The thread supports the same text, GIF, photo, emoji, reply, and reaction features as community channels.
Blocking another resident
The profile popup also has a Block action. Blocks are bidirectional: once you block someone, neither of you sees the other’s DM thread in the Direct tab, and existing messages between you are hidden on both sides. Community channel posts still render to everyone; blocking is a DM-side tool, not a community-wide mute, though neither of you can pick the other in the @mention picker. Your profile page has a Blocked Users accordion for unblocking.
Timeouts and bans
Admins can timeout or ban a resident from community chat. A timeout is a time-limited mute: the resident can still read every channel but can’t post, react, or edit until the timer expires. A ban is the same restriction with no expiration; it lasts until an admin clears it. Both states are enforced in realtime, so the moment an admin lifts a ban the affected resident can post again without reloading.
Admins reach the moderation menu from a resident’s row in the admin Users page, or from the Shield icon in a message’s toolbar inside chat. Bans and timeouts apply to community channels only. DMs are unaffected, since DMs are scoped to two consenting residents and either side can block the other directly.
The word filter
A board can keep a list of words and phrases the community does not want in chat, from the word filter card on the admin Chat page. Each word gets one of three actions. Block stops the message, and the sender sees a note asking them to edit it and try again. Mask sends the message with that word replaced by asterisks. Flag sends it unchanged and files it in the moderation queue on the Content reports page, where an admin decides what to do.
Matching ignores capitals and looks for whole words, so a listed word does not catch a longer word that happens to contain it. Neighbors’ names in mentions are never matched. The filter checks community channels only; direct messages are not checked. It starts switched off, and nothing is filtered until an admin turns it on.
Archived channels
Channels in the Archived group are read-only. New posts, reactions, and edits are blocked. Archiving happens in three ways: an admin archives a channel manually from its settings, the system archives it automatically when a linked poll closes (and unarchives it if the poll is reopened), or the amenity a channel belonged to is removed. Whichever way, the history stays browsable; only the composer is hidden.
An archived channel says which of those happened rather than just announcing it is closed, so you are not left wondering whether something was taken down on purpose. A removed amenity is the case worth knowing about: the amenity is gone, but every answer neighbors gave in its channel is still there to read.