Recently, our team has been working on some important behind-the-scenes updates to lay the foundation for the future of chat.

While most of the improvements won’t be immediately visible, we hope you will start to notice a more polished experience as we prepare for the next iteration of chat features.

As part of this project, we made a handful of small changes that we’ll be rolling out slowly to organizations over the next month. This allows us to monitor the application and your usage to fix potential issues.

What's new

Here are a few changes you’ll notice when it is turned on for your church:

  • You can now see the names and photos of everyone who has read a message rather than an abbreviated list.
  • To keep things tidy, the read receipt indicators and timestamps are hidden for past messages. To view these details for a message, click on it to expand.
  • Services team conversations can now be frozen via the web toolbar interface, allowing only leaders to post messages.
  • When uploading multiple image files, they will display as individual thumbnails with the option to download rather than as a group. 
  • For performance reasons, the “Mark all read” button will no longer show the total number of unread messages. However, each conversation will still show a bubble with the number of unread messages.
  • If you have linked accounts in multiple organizations, the organization switcher will not appear in chat (but is still accessible from your profile in the top-right corner).
  • We removed the “beta” label in the chat header. However, our team is still focused on improving chat through regular bug fixes and feature updates. 
  • For now, these changes only apply to chat in the web toolbar, but some of them will be finding their way into other apps later this summer.

We have more behind-the-scenes projects that should take us through the summer, but we’ll keep you updated as we make changes to chat. 

If you have any features you’d like to see added, please reach out to our Support Team. Your feedback is invaluable as we prioritize new updates for later this year.

💙

~ The Chat Team ~