Channels

Channels are private spaces for a team, a project or a topic. In DMs and group chats everyone has the same abilities. Channels have roles instead, so you decide who can post and who runs the channel.

Your channels are listed on the Channels tab of the Collab sidebar. In a channel, click More (the + button at the top left) for Info, Files, Huddle, Meeting and Manage. See Huddles, Meetings and Attachments.

Plans

Channels come with every paid plan (Plus, Pro, Max and Ultra), and there’s no limit on how many you can create. Everyone in a channel needs a paid plan too:

Creating: on Free, choosing Channel opens an upgrade prompt instead.
Adding people: when you search for someone to add while creating a channel or in Manage, people on Free don’t appear, and Pentos won’t add them to a channel (including through Share With).
If your plan goes back to Free: you stay in your channels with the same role, but you can’t create a channel or add anyone to one until you upgrade again.

DMs and group chats work on every plan. To compare plans, see Subscription.

Creating a Channel

In the Collab sidebar, hover New and choose Channel.
Enter a Channel name. Names can use letters, numbers, spaces, dashes and emoji (the smiley button adds one), up to 50 characters.
Add an optional Description of up to 200 characters, then click Continue.
On Add members, search by name or username (at least 2 characters). Your friends are listed first.
Click Viewer, Member or Admin on a person to add them with that role. In the Selected list you can switch someone’s role, or take them off with the X.
Click Create channel.

The new channel opens right away, with you as its first Admin. Everyone you added gets a notification telling them their role. You don’t have to add anyone yet: you can create the channel on your own and add people later.

Privacy

Every channel is private and invite-only. There’s no channel directory or channel search, and nobody can join a channel on their own: an Admin has to add them. A link to a channel doesn’t give anyone access by itself, because only people in the channel can open it. If you’re an Admin and you post the link in a message, Pentos offers to add the people there who aren’t in the channel yet. Click Share & Send to add them as Members, or Send Without Sharing to just send the message.

Channel messages and descriptions are encrypted at rest by Pentos with AES-256-GCM, using a key unique to each channel, and travel over TLS. Channel names are not encrypted. Channels are not end-to-end encrypted. For more, see Security.

Roles

Everyone in a channel has one of three roles:

Viewer: reads messages, opens the channel’s files and starts or joins huddles and meetings, but can’t send messages, reply or react.
Member: everything a Viewer can do, plus sending messages, replying, reacting, editing and deleting their own messages, and changing the channel’s name and description.
Admin: everything a Member can do, plus adding and removing people, changing roles, deleting anyone’s message, sharing the channel, and archiving, deleting and restoring it.

The person who started the channel is marked Creator in the member list in Channel Info. That label is there for reference only and carries no permissions of its own. The creator starts out as an Admin, but another Admin can change their role or remove them like anyone else.

Every channel needs at least one Admin. If you’re the only Admin and other people are still in the channel, make someone else an Admin before you leave.

For a full breakdown of what each role can do, see Sharing & Permissions.

Renaming and Updating the Description

Members and Admins can rename a channel and change its description. Viewers can’t.

From the sidebar: hover the channel, click its three-dot menu and choose Rename. Type the new name, then press Enter or click away to save, or press Escape to cancel. Names here follow the same rules as a new channel: letters, numbers, spaces, dashes and emoji, up to 50 characters. For Viewers, Rename is greyed out.

From Channel Info:

Choose Info from the channel’s three-dot menu, or open the channel, click More (the + button at the top left) and choose Info.
Click the pencil next to Name or Description.
Make your change and click Save.

In Channel Info a name can be up to 100 characters and a description up to 500. To remove the description, clear it and click Save.

A line in the channel shows who made the change, and everyone else gets a notification. Channel Info also shows your role, when the channel was created and last updated, its members, and its Associations. Click a member to open their profile, or use the buttons beside them: Add friend, when you aren’t friends and haven’t sent them a request, and Message.

Managing Members

Admins add people, change roles and remove people in the Manage Channel sidebar. To open it, do either of these:

Hover the channel in the sidebar, click its three-dot menu, then choose Share > Manage.
Open the channel, click More (the + button at the top left) and choose Manage.

The sidebar has four tabs: Add people (the + tab), Viewers, Members and Admins. Anyone in the channel can open it from More to see who has which role, but only Admins can make changes. Members and Viewers see a note on Add people instead of a search box. The info button next to the title explains each role.

Adding People

On Add people, search by name or username. People on Free don’t appear.
Click Viewer, Member or Admin on a person. They’re listed under Pending, where you can still change their role or take them off.
Click Save.

New people get a notification with their role and can read the channel’s earlier messages. Everyone else sees a line in the channel saying who was added.

Changing Roles and Removing People

Open the Viewers, Members or Admins tab and click Manage (the gear) on the person.
Choose a new role, or click Remove.
Click Save. Cancel discards anything you haven’t saved.

You can save up to 50 changes at a time. You can’t change your own role or remove yourself here: to step away, leave the channel instead. People whose role you change get a Channel Role Updated notification. People you remove lose access to the channel and get a Removed from Channel notification, and everyone else sees a line in the channel saying who was removed.

The Share item in the three-dot menu, shown only to Admins, also has:

Share With: pick a friend on Friends, one of your groups or channels on Groups or Channels, or someone else on Search, then click Share and confirm. Picking a person adds them to this channel as a Member. Picking a group or channel adds all of its members as Members. Pentos also posts a link to the channel there, starting a DM with the person if you don’t have one yet. Everyone added needs a paid plan, and nobody you’ve blocked or who has blocked you can be added: if anyone being added can’t be, nobody is added.
Copy Link: copies a link to the channel. It only opens for people who are in the channel.

Leaving a Channel

Anyone can leave a channel:

Hover the channel, click its three-dot menu and choose Leave.
Confirm with Leave followed by the channel’s name.

You lose access to the channel’s messages and to files other people shared there. Everyone else sees a line saying you left, and the channel’s Admins get a notification.

Last Admin: if you’re the only Admin and others are still in the channel, Pentos asks you to make another member an Admin first.
Last member: if you’re the last person in the channel, the confirmation says so. Leaving then moves the channel to the Recycle Bin, where you can restore it for 30 days before it’s permanently deleted.

Archiving and Deleting

Admins can archive or delete a channel for everyone in it. Open the channel’s three-dot menu, choose Delete, then pick Archive or Delete in the confirmation window. Archived channels move to the Recycle Bin after 30 days, and deleted channels stay in the Recycle Bin for 30 days before they’re permanently deleted. For the details, see Archive, Delete & Restore.