Enabling Team Chat is a great way of boosting teamwork, camaraderie and sportsmanship in your challenge. It allows teams to talk to each other directly within the challenge website and app. Team Chat is disabled by default but can be enabled when creating a challenge or at a later date via your admin area.
Should I Enable Team Chat?
While we think that most organisers will see the benefits of enabling team chat on their challenge, there are a few important things to consider before doing so:
Enabling chat will allow your participants to send text and image (optional, see below) messages to each other within their teams.
We do not actively monitor chats and it would be your responsibility to take any action required if messages are flagged as inappropriate.
Our Terms and Conditions include an Acceptable Use Policy section which all participants have agreed to and any misuse of the system may result in us having to ban or block users.
We hope that everyone will follow the rules and use the chat feature in a friendly manner, but it's important to be aware of the extra content moderation responsibilities that you may have to deal with if you choose to enable chat.
You can optionally choose to allow your participants to upload photos to chat. This may bring with it an extra level of moderation/privacy concerns, so please think carefully before enabling this feature.
Things To Know
Some things to know once you've enabled team chat:
Team chat becomes enabled for a team as soon as the team has been created (ie. even before the challenge begins).
Team chat closes for all teams 7 days after the challenge ends (no more messages can be sent).
Messages are auto-deleted after 30 days for privacy and data security reasons.
If a message is reported, you have 30 days to review it before it is auto-deleted.
How to Enable Team Chat
You can enable Team Chat either when creating your challenge or at a later date.
During the challenge creation process the system will ask you if you wish to enable chat.
If you wish to enable or disable chat at a later date, select your challenge in the admin area then go to Settings, then Chat. This page will allow you to enable/disable chat and also enable/disable photo uploads.
What Happens When a Message is Reported?
A participant can report a message if they feel that the content is inappropriate. The message will be immediately hidden from participants and will enter a "reported" state. An email will be sent to your main site email whenever a message is reported, prompting you to review the message.
Your admin area will also show a notification if there are reported messages waiting to be reviewed.
Dealing With Reported Messages
The Chat section of the admin area lists any chats with reported messages that are awaiting your review.
Clicking on a chat (which will be a team name for Team Chat) will take you into the chat details screen which shows all of the messages, the chat members and allows you to review reported messages.
Clicking on Reported at the top will show you any reported messages for that specific chat. Messages highlighted in red and labelled "pending" are awaiting review.
Clicking on View Report beside a message will show more details about the report.
You can choose to delete the message (and block the user if required), or to restore the message.
Blocking a User From Chat
In exceptional circumstances you may choose to block a user from using the chat feature. To do so, open the chat details screen, select Chat Members at the top of the screen and then click the drop-down button beside the person in question. You should be given the option to Block user. This will disable the chat feature just for their account. You can also un-block a user at any time.
Sending New Messages to Team Chats
You can send messages to team chats if you wish to interact with the team members.
Just open the chat page as above and type your message into the text input box below the chat messages list. Any messages you send from the admin area will be flagged as having been sent by an admin users.
