Option to let users with an account join public conversations as regular participants

[KRW85]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

When a user with an account enters a public conversation through its link, Talk adds them as USER_SELF_JOINED (participant type 5). Such participants cannot pin the conversation as a favourite, neither in the desktop app nor in the browser.

For a team that uses a public conversation internally this is confusing: some members can pin it, others cannot, and nothing in the interface explains the difference. The only thing that distinguishes the two groups is that one was invited and the other followed a link — which is not visible to the people affected.

Describe the solution you'd like

A setting, per conversation or server-wide, that makes an authenticated user a regular participant (type 3) when they join through a link. Guests would keep their current behaviour.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Promoting and immediately demoting each affected participant works, since promoting a self-joined user makes them permanent, but it needs a moderator or a scheduled job and only takes effect after the fact.

Turning the conversation into a group conversation avoids the problem entirely, but gives up link access.

[Antreesy]

Those two options should be activated together, to have a public link and persisstent self-joining coexist together.

Keeping ticket open for internal discussion, this should be better discoverable

[KRW85]

Thanks, that explains it. We had only the link option enabled, which is why some members could pin the conversation and others could not.

On discoverability, from an admin's point of view: what made this hard to find is that nothing connects the two. Both switches live under "Conversation visibility" and describe who can reach the conversation — neither hints that the setting also decides which participant type someone ends up with, and that this in turn governs whether they can pin it.

The participant list does not show it either. A self-joined participant looks exactly like an invited one there, so from the outside it appeared to be a per-user bug: same conversation, same client, same version, and one person can pin it while the person next to them cannot.

Two things would have saved us the search:

• a note on the second switch that registered users joining through the link become regular participants
• some indication in the participant list that someone joined through the link, so a moderator can see the difference and fix it

Happy to test whatever you come up with.