how does topics in hipchat work?

[Suren Pinto]

I would like to understand the difference between setting a topic in and having a chat room. I.e. If I create a marketing chat room, then presumably we will have many topics being discussed in that room. Can you maintain more than 1 topic in a room? or do we need to create separate rooms for each "topic" we are managing?

[Phill Fox]

Hi Suren,

On a personal note I find once a "room" becomes the place for more than three concurrent topics it gets very confused as people drop in and reply to previous responses. If your topics are relatively short-lived ie a question and a couple of quick answers then a single room makes sense. However, once topics become more complex or over an extended period I find separate rooms easier to handle. 

As it is easy to quickly spawn a new room you can even reference it in the main room and only invite the key personnel to the new room thus reducing the overhead for the other parties.

If you use the persistent element of the rooms to review decisions/comments etc. it is far easier with individual rooms rather than trying to unpick several topics in discussion at once.

Hope this helps

Phill