Pin important messages in channels
Pin important messages in channels
Pin a single message to the top of a channel so it’s the first thing every participant sees when they open it. Pins work well for house rules, recurring links, kickoff context, or a fresh announcement you don’t want buried as the conversation moves on.
Before you begin
- You’re an admin or owner of the organization — only admins can pin and unpin messages
- The channel exists and contains the message you want to pin
- The message is a top-level channel message (thread replies can’t be pinned)
- The message has actual text — attachment-only or embed-only messages can’t be pinned, since the pin banner needs a text preview
Pin a message
- Open the channel.
- Hover over the message you want to pin.
- In the action bar that appears above the message, click the thumbtack icon (the tooltip reads Pin message).
The message becomes the channel’s pinned message immediately. A banner appears at the top of the channel showing Pinned by [your avatar and name] and a one-line preview of the message body. The pinned message itself gets a subtle highlight and a small Pinned label above it.
A short system note also drops into the channel timeline — for example, “Alex pinned a message · Jump” — so participants who are reading along see what changed.
Replace the pinned message
A channel can hold one pinned message at a time. When you pin a second message, upcoach asks you to confirm the swap:
Replace pinned message? Only one message can be pinned per channel. Pinning this message will unpin the current one.
Click Pin message to replace it, or Cancel to leave the existing pin in place.
Jump to the pinned message
Anyone in the channel can click the pin banner to jump straight to where the message lives in the conversation. This is useful when the pin is older and would otherwise take some scrolling to find. Hovering the banner on desktop reveals a Jump to message hint.
The system note left in the timeline (“…pinned a message · Jump”) is also clickable for the same reason.
Unpin a message
You can remove the current pin in two places:
- From the banner — Hover the pin banner at the top of the channel and click the small × on the right (titled Unpin message).
- From the message itself — Hover the pinned message and click the same thumbtack icon you used to pin it. The tooltip now reads Unpin message.
After unpinning, the banner disappears and a system note records who unpinned it. Participants can still scroll back to find the original message — unpinning doesn’t delete anything.
What participants see
Every member of the channel sees the same pin banner at the top, and the same system notes when a pin changes. Only admins see the × unpin control on the banner and the thumbtack action on individual messages — for everyone else, the pin is read-only.
Tips
- Use channel pins for the one thing that matters most right now — a kickoff link, this week’s prompt, or an updated meeting time. Two pins compete for attention; one pin focuses it.
- For longer-lived announcements that need a title, formatting, and comments, post to the feed instead. See Use the feed for announcements.
- If you want a message to be pinnable, make sure it has at least some text — attachments and embeds can ride along, but the message body needs words for the banner preview.