Organization chat

Madebook does not hold your organization's chat. Channels, direct messages, attachments and reactions all live in the Bookbag account service, the same place that holds your sign-in, your organizations and your files. Madebook shows them.

That is the point of it: one organization has one set of conversations, and Madebook, Openbook and Bookbag are three windows onto it — not three chats. A message sent from the bubble in Madebook is in the thread a colleague is reading in Openbook, and the unread badge is the same badge.

Chat is the one place in Madebook where people talk to each other rather than to an agent. It is not governed, not audited into the Madebook audit log, and not part of any mission — no policy applies to it and no allow-list constrains it, because nothing in it reaches a model.

Where to find it

• The bubble. A blue circle in the bottom-right corner of every Madebook page. It carries an unread count and opens a panel over whatever you were looking at. This is the only chat surface inside Madebook.
• The Chat page at your Bookbag account. The organization's page at Bookbag account (sso.bookbag.ai/user/organizations/<id>) has a Chat page with the same conversations, full size.

Madebook no longer has a chat page of its own. The old address, /organizations/<id>/chat, redirects to the organization's page at Bookbag account. The organization sidebar no longer has a Chat row; see Where everything is.

Channels and direct messages

Two kinds of conversation, listed together, most recent first.

• Channels are open to the organization. Everyone can see one exists and can read it; posting to a channel joins you to it.
• Direct messages are between the people in them. A DM you are not in is not listed and cannot be opened. Starting one with a set of people who already have a DM reopens that conversation rather than making a second, so two people never end up with two threads and half the history in each.

Start either from New message: search the people list, optionally name the channel, and press Create channel or Start chat. Everyone in the organization is in that list, including anybody invited by email who has not signed in yet — they are marked pending and become reachable when they register.

What a message can carry

• Text, editable afterwards by its author and nobody else, which marks it edited.
• Mentions, typed with @. A mention raises a notification for that person in every product's bell, not only Madebook's. Names are checked against the organization's roster, so a mention cannot reach somebody outside it.
• Reactions, which toggle — clicking an emoji you already added removes it.
• Attachments — see below.
• Pins. Any member of a conversation may pin or unpin a message; pinned messages list newest first.

You can search within a conversation — a case-insensitive match on message text — and start a video call from the thread header for others in the conversation to join.

Deleting a message is the author's to do. It removes the message, its reactions and its attachment rows for everyone.

Who can see a conversation

Membership of the organization is what grants access. There is no separate chat permission and no list to maintain: if somebody is in the organization at your Bookbag account, they can open chat for it; if they are not, they cannot.

Your Madebook role — owner, admin, member or viewer — does not change what you can do in chat. Everyone in the organization can read, post, attach and react.

Three consequences:

• Removing somebody from the organization ends their chat access immediately, not when something expires. Membership is re-checked on every call, not once at sign-in.
• A conversation in another organization simply does not exist for you. It is reported as not found rather than as forbidden — "not yours" and "not there" are the same answer, and the difference only helps somebody guessing at ids.
• If you cannot chat here, you see no chat. When access is refused the bubble does not render at all: not a disabled button, not an error.

Access is granted by a short-lived token that Madebook's server mints on your behalf, good for about fifteen minutes and renewed quietly. Everything after that happens between your browser and the account service; Madebook is not in the path, and it never sees a message. The one visible symptom is a panel that reconnects after a laptop has been asleep.

Retrying a message

If an upload or send fails, the composer keeps your text and selected files. Retry from the same open composer: files that already uploaded are reused, and a repeated send request returns the saved message instead of posting it twice. This also covers a lost response after SSO saved the message.

SSO validates every attachment before saving a message. A missing file, a file from another organization, or a file uploaded by someone else causes the send to fail; attachments are never silently dropped. A message supports up to ten files.

Where attachments go

Attach files with the paperclip in the composer.

Chat attachments are ordinary files in your organization's storage at the account service. They are counted against that organization's allowance, appear in its file list tagged Chat when you are allowed to read them, and are charged to the organization owner's Bookbag account like every other byte the platform holds — including the ones the other Bookbag products save. There is one allowance, and chat spends from it — see Storage and files.

Two refusals, both shown in the composer as a plain sentence rather than a failure:

That file is too large (25.4MB; the limit is 20MB).

Storage limit reached. Point this organization at its own storage provider, or ask a platform admin for a higher limit.

Both are settled on the organization's Storage and Files pages at Bookbag account: delete files, point the organization at its own S3 bucket, Dropbox or SharePoint, or ask a platform administrator to raise the number. See Storage and files for the allowance, the per-file ceiling and the four places the bytes can live.

Deleting a message does not delete its files. The message goes; the bytes stay in the organization's file list and keep counting against the allowance. To reclaim the room, delete the file itself as well.

SSO checks file access as well as conversation access. Uploaders can read their own files; other organization members need access to a conversation containing the attachment. A private message attachment does not become readable to everyone through the organization’s Files page. A link in a message is not a permanent address — it carries a short-lived credential and stops working shortly after it is copied out of the page. Open the file from the message rather than saving its URL.

What this is not

Madebook has several things that look conversational and are not this.

	Organization chat	What it is not
Who is talking	People, to each other	A work session is an agent's transcript with its client, not a conversation you join
Where it lives	The Bookbag account service	A mission and its contract live in Madebook, scoped to a workspace
Scope	One organization	Decisions and the brief are a workspace's record, and are what agents read
Governed	No. Nothing in it reaches a model	Everything an agent is told passes the allow-lists

Chat is for the people. Nothing an agent is briefed with comes from it, and putting a decision in chat does not put it in the workspace's context — that is what Decisions is for.

Related

• Organizations — what an organization is and where it lives
• Roles and permissions
• Where everything is — every sidebar row