Project chat

The conversation attached to each project — who can see it, how unread messages are flagged, and the one behavior that surprises people.

Every shared project has its own chat room, so coordination questions live next to the coordination instead of in a text thread nobody can find later.

Open the chat

Click the chat icon in the project bar. A Project Chat panel opens in the bottom-right corner; type in the box at the bottom and press Enter.

• Open in new window pops the chat out into its own window — useful on a second screen during a show.
• The X closes the panel. Messages keep arriving while it’s closed.
• On phones, the chat button opens the conversation as a full page instead of a panel.

When the chat appears

The chat icon only shows once a project has more than one collaborator — there’s nobody to talk to otherwise — and it’s hidden for local projects, which never leave your computer. It’s also unavailable while SoundBase Desktop is offline, since messages travel through the cloud.

Who can read it

Everyone with access to the project: the owner, admins, and anyone who is an editor or viewer of any application in it. There is one room per project — not per site, zone, or app — so a message you send in Coord is visible to someone working in Nexus on the same project.

Note

Treat it as a project-wide channel: everyone with project access can read the whole history, including people whose site permissions are set to Viewer or Deny.

Unread messages

When someone posts while your panel is closed, the chat button becomes a New Messages! button, and your browser tab title changes to match — so you notice even in another tab. Opening the chat clears it.

Caution

The unread indicator is based on who was in the project when the message was sent. If a collaborator wasn’t in the project at that moment, they’ll never see a New Messages! flag — the message is waiting in the chat, but nothing points them to it.

For anything that must be acted on, don’t rely on chat alone: message the person directly, or leave the detail somewhere durable like project notes, zone notes, or a frequency’s notes.

What the chat doesn’t do

Messages are plain text, and there are no @-mentions, threads, file attachments, reactions, or editing and deleting after sending. Formatting and pasted HTML are stripped.

History is kept for the life of the project — nothing expires or is trimmed — and it’s deleted only when the project itself is permanently deleted. Older messages load as you scroll up.