Minds Chat Advanced Settings By #MindsGaming

Welcome back to another Minds Chat blog. In our last blog Introduction To Minds Chat, we went over the basics of creating a room, notification settings and personal preferences. In this blog we are going to get into some experimental features and advanced settings.

Experimental Features

Minds Chat offers a few experimental features. You can toggle them in your account settings under labs. If you don’t remember how to access your settings click the down arrow next to your profile name in the left sidebar and then click notification settings.

 Next Click On Labs

Once you have accessed your labs you will be given a list of experimental features that you can toggle on and off, we are going to go over “Spaces prototype. Incompatible with Communities, Communities v2…” (spaces) and “Message Pinning”
 

Spaces

Spaces prototype gives you a build-able list of rooms in your side bar. This way you can organize between your built groups and joined groups or make a list of suggested groups. Users that create spaces can invite others to the space and provide them with a list of rooms to join. You can also make others moderators of your space allowing them to add more rooms to your space to build and expansive community based off topic rooms.

To join or create a space you must have the experimental feature turned on or you will be taken to a closed group that doesn’t seem to have any purpose. I assume once fully fixed up and implemented this will no longer be an issue.

Once you have toggled spaces on in your lab you will need to refresh chat and be presented with a new layout for your chat menu. On the left hand side you will see a home icon and a plus icon. The home icon takes you to groups you have already joined, click the plus sign to create a new space.

Once you have filled out the space form to create a space you will be given the list of rooms you have already joined to move from your home list to your new space, as well as the option to create new rooms and add them to the space by default.

Once you have added rooms to your space they will appear in the sidebar, just click your space icon. Users that have joined your space will also appear under people in your space. That’s it your done you have your own space make sure to invite some users! Join Our Space Here!

Message Pinning

Message pinning is actually pretty self explanatory but a cool feature. When toggled on you will be able to view and pin content inside your chat room. This includes other users content inside the group as long as its not a reply.

Once you have toggled the option on in your labs refresh the chat page. You will now be able to pin posts inside the group, just click the options menu on a post and “Pin Message” .

Once Pinned users who have the feature will be given a thumb tack in the top right corner. When clicked it will display the pinned post in the room.

Encryption

Security and encryption is always a hard subject to handle. We recommend you read about encryption from Matrix (https://matrix.org/faq/#encryption). As many users have asked me for help with encryption I am going to cover the basics with a test account here.

Keys

When you first access Minds Chat you will be given and told to save your encryption keys for direct messages as well as encrypted rooms and create a secure backup. To do this click continue when promoted.

After you click continue you will be given an option to generate or create a security key.

I will use the system to generate a key but the process should be about the same. After you have generated or create you key you will need to save it to a safe location like a password manager. Do not save it in a blog like this.

Last you will be asked to sign-on with the encrypted key to prove your identity.

You will be taken to a security screen to “confirm its you”, click continue to verify your session and encrypted key. You will be taken back to chat and should be presented with a confirmed screen.

That’s it! Now your session is verified and your keys are set for encrypted rooms. If you already have an account and never did this or need to made a new key or reset you can do this in your security settings under “encryption” , “Secured Backup” you will have to delete or re-verify old sessions to use them.

Blog Closing

There are many more features and tweaks we haven’t covered but if you want to know more about a feature or how to use it let us know! Thanks for stopping by and reading and I hope this really helps. Feel free to stop by our help room chat if you need!