Making a Channel on Slack

You might want to make a new channel on Slack when you and your team want a separate space to discuss a certain project or chat about your pets!

Making a new channel is easy. Go to where it says Channel under your team name and click on the little + sign within the circle. A new menu will open. There’s a button where you can select whether to make the channel private or not.

When naming your channel, there are a few rules.

• It must be lowercase.
• It cannot have spaces or periods.
• It must be shorter than 22 characters.

You can also set the purpose of the room. So you might want to put in “This channel is to discuss everything relating to the X project”.

Then you can invite whomever you like as long as they are in the team.

When a channel is public, it can be found by anyone in the team even if they haven’t been invited. If you are not an owner or admin of a team you will not be able to create a public channel. You can make a public channel private by going to the channel and clicking on the gear that is beside the search bar and clicking Additional options and clicking Convert this channel to a private channel, this cannot be undone. Once a channel is private it cannot be made public.

When a channel is private, it can only be viewed by the people that have been invited to the channel. As far as I can tell the only way for the channel owner to access these chat logs is by writing a physical letter to Slack and asking for the logs. My advice on that one would be not to discuss anything you want kept private on a company tool.