This posting is being used to discuss some of the features of the new Pack Rats’ Chat Room that are important to know so that you can get maximum benefit from the Chat Room during the contest.
The new Pack Rats’ Chat Room facility on Slack will be a very useful tool during contests. I believe that it will be even more useful than the old Chat Room, which many of us found quite helpful during prior contests.
While the new Chat Room has many advantages over the old one, for contesting it has particular advantages which include:
- The Chat Room can be accessed from the Slack App on a smart phone, so you don’t need to be at your computer to communicate using the chat room.
- If you have the Slack App on your smart phone, you can set it up so that you receive a notification on your smart phone whenever anyone posts a new message.
- The server that was used for the old chat room was subject to outages and was down for several hours during a recent contest. The Slack site is much less likely to have such outages.
There are Slack apps for both the computer (Windows, iOS, and Linux all have Slack apps) and the smart phone (iPhone, Android, and even Windows Phone), and the Slack app looks a bit different depending on the device/OS on which it is installed. I will show and explain typical screens for an iPhone below. You can find the discussion of the Windows PC app here
Below is an image of an iPhone screen showing the Slack App icon at the left end of the second row. To access the Slack App you just touch the Slack App icon.
Below is the main Slack window as seen on an iPhone. Centered on this screen is the #general channel’s message thread, ordered chronologically with most recent messages at the bottom. The #general message thread is the main message thread for the Pack Rats’ Chat Room, and it is shown here because “#general” has been selected in the Channel Selection Window which will be discussed later in this tutorial.
To send a new message in the #general channel, just touch the textbox that is labeled “Message #general” at the bottom of this message steam, then type your message into the textbox, and then touch the “Send” button. If you want to attach a file to the message that you are about to post, then before you touch the “Send” button, touch the “Paper-Clip-and-Page-With-Text” Icon below the message textbox where you are typing your message and then either touch one of the files that appears in the pop-up list below the text box or touch the “Add a File” button which will bring up more files. If you do the latter, just touch a file to select it. Alternatively, if you want to send an image, touch the Image Icon that is located just to the left of the “Send” button and then either select an image by touching it, take a new photo by touching the Camera Icon and proceeding appropriately, or touch the “Tic-Tac-Toe” Icon to bring up a list of directories where you have stored files on your iPhone. You can see these choices below:
After you have selected your attachments and completed typing your message, just touch the “Send” button to send your message and its attachments.
Rather than sending a message to all chat room members via the #general channel by touching the Message #general textbox as described above, you can instead send a direct (private) message to any single chat room member. This is very useful when using the chat room to provide liaison while running the bands during a contest. When you direct message someone, you and he/she can communicate privately without creating “noise” on the main chat thread that might annoy other list members, and you will not be bothered by any “noise” created by the other list members while you are communicating via direct messaging. There are several ways to send a private direct message to another chat room member. One easy way to send a private direct message to another chat room member is to [1] touch the “/” icon below the textbox at the bottom of the main message thread and then [2] type “dm ” into the textbox (don’t forget to type the space after typing “dm”) and [3] touch the “@” icon below the textbox. That will bring up a scrollable list of chat room members, and you can [4] scroll through that list and [5] select the member whom you want to direct message by touching his/her listing. Below you can see the screen as it looks just after I performed steps 1-4:
After you have performed step 5 and thus selected the member you want to direct (private) message, you can type your message into the textbox and then touch the “Send” button to send the direct message. Below you can see how the screen looks after I have selected Al K3WGR from the scrollable members list and then typed into the textbox a short message to Al. The next thing that I would do is to touch the “Send” button to send the message:
Another easy way of sending a private direct message is as follows. First touch the 3 dots aligned vertically at the top right of the main window, just to the right of the magnifying glass icon. Then you will be presented with a list of multiple labels, each of which acts as a portal to another screen, as is shown below.
On this window, touch the “Directory” label and you will be presented with a scrollable list of chat room members and a Search box, as is shown below.
You can either scroll to find the member that you want or type a query into the Search box to locate the member to whom you want to send a direct message. Once you have found the member whom you want to direct message, touch his listing and you will be presented with a page on which you just need to touch the “Message” button in order to type and send him/her a private direct message, as is shown below:
After you have touched the “Message” button on the window shown above, you will be presented with the screen shown below and you can type your message into the text box and then touch “Send” to send it. In this example, I have chosen Al KB2AYU from the members list and so the message textbox has the caption “Message Al KB2AYU FM29jr”, indicating that my message will be a direct message sent only to Al KB2AYU.
Once you send the direct message using either of the methods detailed above, your screen will no longer show the #general main chat room thread. Instead, it will show your direct message thread with the member whom you just direct-messaged. So instead of seeing “#general” at the top of your screen, you will now see the name of the member whom you just direct-messaged. In the example below, because I had direct-messaged Al K3WGR FN10xi, we see “Al K3WGR FN10xi” at the top of the screen, and we see my direct message thread with him below. At the bottom of the screen, the text message box has the caption “Message Al K3WGR FN10xi”, because any message that I write into it will be a private direct message sent only to Al. This is shown below:
If you have previously sent or received a direct message from a list member, then that member will be listed under the heading “Direct Messages” in the Channel Selection Window. You can get to the Channel Selection Window by touching the multicolored Slack Hashtag Icon at the left upper corner of the main Slack window, as is shown in the image above. The Channel Selection Window looks like the image below:
You can see in the image above that the main Slack App window is currently set to show the #general main chat room thread, because “#general” is highlighted with a blue background. If you wanted to change that, you would just touch the name of the member whose direct message thread you wanted to view. Once you had selected that member you would immediately be taken to that member’s direct message thread and you could send a direct message to that member by typing into the direct message textbox at the bottom of that member’s direct message thread and then touching the “Send” button. Note that when you are viewing the Channel Selection Window, you see near the bottom of the screen 3 small dots, with the outer two dots being colored gray and the middle dot being colored black. If you swipe left from the Channel Selection Window, the center dot at the bottom of the screen turns grey, the right-most dot turns black, and you are presented with a list of all of your direct message threads, as you can see below. Touching any one of the thread names in the list will take you to that direct message thread.
You can swipe right twice from the window with the list of all of your direct messages, or swipe right once from the Channel Selection Window and you will be taken to the Workspaces Window. If your only Slack Workspace is the Pack Rats’ Chat Room, then that is all you will see here. If you belong to multiple Slack Workspaces, then you will find them all listed here, and you can change from one workspace to another by touching the listing of the workspace that you want to enter. The Workspaces Window is shown below:
Wherever there is a listing of chat room members, those members who are currently “online” are designated with a green “bullet”. Those members who are not currently online are designated with an open circle instead of a green bullet. You can see this in the image below, which shows the Channel Selection Window on the left and a window showing a list of chat room members on the right. On both windows, Al KB3SIG FM29dV has a green bullet next to his name because he is online.
The remainder of this tutorial will focus on Settings and Preferences. If, when you are at the main Slack App Window that shows the main #general message thread, you touch the “#general” label at the top of the screen, you will be taken to an “Info” page. If you scroll down on this page, you will see a number of labels, each of which provides access to additional windows. These labels are “Notifications”, “Members”, “Apps”, and “Pinned”, as you can see below. We will discuss only the first two of these labels.
If you touch the “Notifications” label, you will be taken to the screen shown below. Note that I have selected the option “All new messages” so that my iPhone notifies me with every new message that is posted on the Pack Rats’ Chat Room. This will of course NOT notify me of Direct Messages that are being exchanged between other chat room members, because those messages are private and can be seen only by the members who are exchanging them.
If instead of touching the “Notifications” label on the Info window you touch the “Members” label, you will see the Members Window, which shows a scrollable list of all chat room members, as is shown below.
If you touch a member’s listing on this page, you will be taken to a screen where you have the option of sending a private direct message to that member or calling him/her (if he/she provided his/her phone number in his/her profile information), as you can see below. Before creating the screen image below I selected Al KB2AYU FM29jr from the members listing in the screen above. Touch the “Message” button to send a private direct message, or touch “Call” to make a phone call to Al (if he has provided his phone number). So this is yet another way to send a direct message to a chat room member.
Below, to refresh your memory, is another image of the main Slack App Window that shows the main #general message thread.
As you will recall from when we were discussing one of the ways to initiate a direct message, if you touch the 3 dots aligned vertically at the top right of the window, just to the right of the magnifying glass icon, you will be presented with a list of multiple labels, each of which acts as a portal to another screen, as is shown below. In addition to the “Directory” label, which we used to initiate the sequence of steps that led up to our sending a direct message, there are several other labels on this window. We will discuss only the “Edit Profile” and “Settings” labels which are near the bottom of the screen.
Touching the “Edit Profile” label brings up the screen shown below. On this screen you can change your display name and if you wish, provide your phone number so that you can be called from within the Slack Pack Rats’ Chat Room App by members without their needing to look up and enter your phone number.
If instead of selecting the “Edit Profile” label you had selected the “Settings” label, you would have seen the screen shown below. From this screen you can edit your profile, set your availability (I suggest setting it to Active), fine tune your Notification parameters, activate or set parameters for “Do Not Disturb”. I would suggest that you avoid changing any of the settings below “Do Not Disturb” on this screen unless you really know what you are doing. No user support will be provided for problems caused by messing with these best-to-avoid-changing settings.
