How to create and organise channels

Channels and folders are both made from the ⋯ menu beside your workspace name. Folders group channels visually; they grant no access of their own.

Before you start

Creating channels and folders needs the Create channels permission, which new workspaces give to admins only. An admin can lower it to lead or member in How to set who can do what.

If you have no ⋯ menu beside the workspace name and no ⋯ on any folder, that is what it means.

How do you create a channel?

⋯ → Add channel. Give it a name of up to 80 characters, optionally flip it to Private, and optionally choose the folder it lands in.

You can also create one straight inside a folder from that folder's ⋯ → Add channel, which pre-selects it.

Decide the name and the private switch before you save, because both are fixed afterwards. There is no rename, and private is a one-time choice at the moment of creation.

Name channels the way your team talks. A channel nobody can guess the name of is a channel nobody posts in.

What does private mean?

Hidden from everyone in the workspace except admins. It does not appear in an ordinary member's list at all, and a link to it returns a not-found page rather than a permission error, so its existence gives nothing away.

Understand what that means before you use it: a private channel is effectively admin-only. Adding specific people to one is not something you can do today, so a private channel is the right tool for admin conversation and the wrong tool for "this team plus two others".

For a conversation between two people, a direct message is the better fit and grants both participants automatically. See How to send a direct message.

How do folders work?

A folder is a visual grouping in the sidebar. It grants no access and changes nothing about who can read what.

⋯ → Add category creates one with a name of up to 80 characters. Then edit it from its own ⋯ to set an icon and one of five colours: blue, violet, green, amber or rose, chosen from a searchable icon picker.

The icon and colour are set by editing, not at creation, so making a folder is two steps.

A coloured tile beside a folder name is worth the minute it takes. Once a workspace has fifteen channels, colour is how people find the right one without reading.

How do you tidy the list?

Click a folder's name to roll it up. Collapsing the folders you do not use every day is the single most effective thing you can do to a busy sidebar.

That state is remembered per browser rather than per account, so your laptop and your phone keep their own arrangement.

Channels always land in the same position within a folder, so plan the grouping rather than the order.

How do you delete a folder?

From its ⋯, with a confirmation that names how many channels will move out of it.

Deleting a folder never deletes its channels. They reappear ungrouped at the top of the list, which the confirmation says explicitly.

Deleting a folder is permanent, so read that count before you agree: it tells you how much of your sidebar is about to become ungrouped.

What should the folders be?

The way your team divides its work, which is usually close to your departments.

Fairgreen groups theirs as Production, Marketing, Warehouse and Suppliers, with a green-tiled Warehouse folder because that is the one people need to find in a hurry.

Resist a folder per project. Projects end and folders do not, and there is no way to reorder them afterwards.

Who gets notified in a new channel?

Everybody who can see it, at whatever level they have set. Point people at How to mute or follow a channel when you create a busy one, so they turn it down rather than turning chat off.