Chat in rooms
Chat happens in two places, in rooms and in 1-to-1 chats.
You can have rooms for individual teams and projects, for planning an event, for an interest area, or as a social space for your office's D&D guild or cycling enthusiasts. Rooms can also be used as a notification channel, for example you might have an Outage room that's updated when critical systems are down.
Screenshot: Hipchat room
Joining rooms
To join a room, search for the room by its name.
- Start typing the room's name in Find rooms and people at the top. (If you don't see it, tap
or swipe right.) - Tap the room's name to join the room.
- Tap
> Join chat. - Start typing the room's name.
- Tap the room's name to join the room.
Once you've joined, you can start chatting with your teammates.
Can't find a room, but you know it exists? The room may be a private room. In that case, you'll have to ask the room's admin to invite you to the room.
Creating rooms
Hipchat has open rooms that anyone in your Hipchat group can join and private rooms that you can invite specific people to join. Only people who have been invited to a private room can see that room. (Well, one exception is admins.) When you create a room, you're prompted to choose whether you want the room to be open or private.
Where you create a room differs in some apps, so we'll list the steps to get you started for each one separately:
- Tap
and follow the prompts to create the room. - Choose the people you want to invite to the room and tap Next.
- Tap Send invites.
- Tap > Create Room.
- Follow the prompts to create the room.
- Tap Invite to start inviting people to the room right away. Or, tap Not Now to wait until later.
The person who creates a room is the room admin. More about room admins in the next sections of this page.
After you create a room, invite people to join you in the room.
Managing rooms
Rooms come and go, and their purpose might change over time. Room admins and group admins can rename, archive, delete rooms, and more.
If you're an admin you can log in to Hipchat in your browser and head to Group Admin > Rooms.
If you're the room admin, you can either log in to Hipchat in your browser and go to the Rooms tab, or head for the Room Actions option in the Hipchat web or desktop app (it looks like 
or 
).
Here are some tips for managing Hipchat rooms:
- If a room isn't needed, but you want to maintain the chat history you can archive it.
- If a room isn't needed, and you want to discard the chat history you can delete it.
- If you want to open up a private room or make a room private, you can change the privacy settings.
- If the purpose of the room changes, you can rename it.
You can't manage rooms in the iOS or Android apps.
Changing the room admin
Sometimes you need to change the room admin. For example if your team gets a new team lead, you might want them to be the admin of your team's Hipchat room.
Only two people can change the admin of a private room: the Hipchat admin or the current room admin. Here's how it's done:
- Log in to Hipchat in your browser.
- Go to the Rooms tab (or Group Admin > Rooms if you're an admin).
- Choose the room you want to change from the list.
- Choose Permissions then select a new admin from the Room admin menu.