Beyond everyday messages, Chat gives you a few tools for gathering input and finding things again: polls, pins, a per-channel files browser, and search.
Polls
A poll is attached to a message — the question is the message text. Polls can be single-answer or multiple-answer.
Creating a poll
In the composer, open the attach menu and choose Create poll.
Type your question (up to 300 characters).
Add 2–10 answer options, each up to 55 characters.
Pick a duration — 1 hour, 4 hours, 8 hours, 1 day, 3 days, 7 days, or 14 days — or set a custom end date up to a year out.
To let people pick more than one option, turn on multiple answers.
Voting and closing
Single-answer polls swap your choice when you pick a different option.
Multiple-answer polls let you toggle each option on and off. You can also clear all of your votes.
A poll closes automatically when its time runs out, or the author (and channel admins) can end it early. Once closed, no more voting is possible.
Tip: Polls are not anonymous. Everyone sees the vote counts and a small sample of voters, and the full list of who voted for each option is visible to the poll's creator and channel admins (and, in a Private Message, to any participant). There is no fully anonymous poll.
Pins
Pinning keeps an important message in the channel's Pins panel, which lists pinned messages newest-first with no limit on how many. Pinning also posts a small "pinned a message" note in the channel.
Tip: In standalone channels, group chats, and service-plan chats, only admins can pin or unpin. In Private Messages and threads, any member can.
Files and attachments
You can attach files and images to a message.
Up to 10 files per message.
Maximum size: 25 MB per file on standard chat, 250 MB with Member Chat Pro.
Allowed types: images (JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP, SVG, TIFF), PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, CSV, TXT, XML, JSON, ZIP, MP3, and MP4/MOV.
Images show inline previews. Every channel also has a Files panel that lists every attachment shared in the channel and its threads and posts, newest first, with filters by file type and uploader and a filename search. You must be a member of the channel to see it.
Search
Chat search looks through message text across all the channels, Private Messages, threads, and forum posts you're a member of — it never returns content from conversations you can't see.
You can refine a search with filters for the sender, a specific channel, who's mentioned, a date range, and what a message contains (a pin, reply, link, image, or file). At least one search term or filter is required.
