Threads, Pins and Starred Three ways to stop a conversation scrolling away, and which to use when.

A busy channel loses things. Three tools stop that happening, and they are for different problems.

Threads: keep a tangent out of the room

Reply in a thread and the discussion hangs off the original message rather than pushing everything else up the channel.

Use one the moment a reply generates its own conversation. Two people going back and forth eight times in the main channel makes the room unreadable for everyone else, and the thread costs nothing to start.

Pins: this matters to everyone here

Pinning puts a message in the channel's pinned panel, where anyone can find it without scrolling.

Pins are for the room, not for you. The deployment checklist, the current sprint goal, the link everybody asks for weekly. A channel with thirty pins has none, so prune them when they stop being current.

Starred: this matters to me

Starring is private. It is your own shortlist, visible to nobody else, for messages you need to come back to.

The distinction is worth holding: pin for the room, star for yourself. Starring something important to everyone leaves the room without it.

Topics

Channels can carry topics, which group related discussion inside a single room rather than requiring a new channel per subject. Reach for a topic before creating a channel; channels are easy to make and hard to retire.

Scheduled messages

You can write a message now and have it sent later. Useful when you are working outside someone's hours and would rather not put a notification on their evening.