Organization chat

Bookbag does not hold your organization's chat. Channels, direct messages, attachments and reactions all live in the Bookbag account service, the same place that holds your sign-in, your organizations and your files. Bookbag shows them.

That is the point of it: one organization has one set of conversations, and Bookbag, Openbook and Madebook are three windows onto it — not three chats. A message sent from the bubble here is in the thread a colleague is reading in Openbook, and the unread badge is the same badge.

This is not the chat you build in. The conversation in the left column of a project is you talking to the builder — every message there starts a build run. Organization chat is you talking to other people, it costs no credits, and it is not an AI feature at all. See The chat for the other one.

The two ways in

Both show the same conversations.

• The bubble. A blue circle in the bottom-right corner of every signed-in page. It carries an unread count and opens a panel over whatever you were looking at. It renders nothing at all until it knows which organization you are looking at, so a page that is not in one costs nothing.
• The page. Pick your organization in the sidebar and open Chat, between Members and Storage.

Organization chat Everyone in {your organization}. The same conversations appear in every Bookbag product.

Which organization the bubble is showing follows what you are looking at: the organization you have open, or the one a project belongs to, or otherwise the one you are working in. Switching organization means a different set of conversations — a chat token names exactly one organization and cannot be widened.

Channels and direct messages

Two kinds of conversation, listed together, most recent first.

• Channels are open to the organization. Everyone can see one exists and can read it; posting to a channel joins you to it.
• Direct messages are between the people in them. A DM you are not in is not listed and cannot be opened. Starting one with a set of people who already have a DM reopens that conversation rather than making a second, so two people never end up with two threads and half the history in each.

Start either from New message: search the people list, optionally name the channel, and press Create channel or Start chat. Everyone in the organization is in that list, including anybody invited by email who has not signed in yet — they are marked pending and become reachable when they register.

What a message can carry

• Text, editable afterwards by its author and nobody else, which marks it edited.
• Mentions, typed with @. A mention raises a notification for that person in every product's bell, not only Bookbag's — and Bookbag's bell already shows notifications from every product. Names are checked against the organization's roster, so a mention cannot reach somebody outside it.
• Reactions, which toggle — clicking an emoji you already added removes it.
• Attachments — see below.
• Pins. Any member of a conversation may pin or unpin a message; pinned messages list newest first.

You can search within a conversation — a case-insensitive match on message text — and start a video call from the thread header for other members to join.

Deleting a message is the author's to do. It removes the message, its reactions and its attachment rows for everyone.

Who can see a conversation

Membership of the organization is what grants access. There is no separate chat permission and no list to maintain: if somebody is in the organization at your Bookbag account, they can open chat for it; if they are not, they cannot.

Your role — owner, admin, member or viewer — does not change what you can do in chat. Everyone in the organization can read, post, attach and react, viewers included. That is worth noting, because a viewer can do very little else: see Roles and permissions.

Three consequences:

• Removing somebody from the organization ends their chat access immediately, not when something expires. Membership is re-checked on every call, not once at sign-in.
• A conversation in another organization simply does not exist for you. It is reported as not found rather than as forbidden — "not yours" and "not there" are the same answer, and the difference only helps somebody guessing at ids.
• If you cannot chat here, you see no chat. When access is refused the bubble does not render at all: not a disabled button, not an error. On the full page you get a plain card instead — Chat is not available here.

Access is carried by a short-lived token that Bookbag's server mints on your behalf, good for about fifteen minutes and renewed quietly. Everything after that happens between your browser and the account service; Bookbag is not in the path and never sees a message. The one visible symptom is a panel that reconnects after a laptop has been asleep.

Where attachments go

Attach files with the paperclip in the composer.

Chat attachments are ordinary files in your organization's storage at the account service. They are counted against that organization's allowance, appear in its file list tagged Chat, and are charged to the organization owner's Bookbag account like every other byte the platform holds — including the ones Openbook and Madebook save. There is one allowance, and chat spends from it.

Two refusals, both shown in the composer as a plain sentence rather than a failure:

That file is too large (25.4MB; the limit is 20MB).

Storage limit reached. Point this organization at its own storage provider, or ask a platform admin for a higher limit.

Both are settled at the account service, on that organization's Storage page: delete files, point the organization at its own S3 bucket, Dropbox or SharePoint, or ask a platform administrator to raise the number.

Chat attachments have nothing to do with credits. Credits pay for builds. Attachments spend storage. The two meters are unrelated, and filling one does not touch the other.

Deleting a message does not delete its files. The message goes; the bytes stay in the organization's file list and keep counting against the allowance. To reclaim the room, delete the file itself as well.

Attachments are readable only through chat, by people who can read the message they hang off. A link in a message is not a permanent address — it carries a short-lived credential and stops working shortly after it is copied out of the page. Open the file from the message rather than saving its URL.

Chat against the project chat

The two are easy to mix up, because the sidebar item inside an organization is simply labelled Chat while the page it opens is headed Organization chat.

	Organization chat	A project's chat
Who you are talking to	Other people in the organization	The builder
What a message does	Posts a message	Starts a build run
Scope	One organization	One project
Where it lives	Your Bookbag account, shared with Openbook and Madebook	Bookbag's own database, with the project
Visible in other products	Yes	No
Cost	Nothing	Credits, in managed mode — see AI configuration
Composer reads	Aa — type @ to mention	Describe the next change…

Related

• Organizations — what an organization is and where it lives
• Roles and permissions
• Your account
• The chat — the other one