A great new feature that we've added this semester is the ability for students to open private threads for private questions. Gone are the days of /reply 1234 for private questions! While this change makes things a lot easier for students and staff alike, there are a few management things that you should know about as a staff member.

Archiving Threads

As a staff member, you should never be deleting threads that students make for private questions. Instead, archival is the way to go. To archive a thread, you can use the /archive command from within that thread's channel. This will remove it from your channel list until someone decides to unarchive it.

Unarchiving Threads

Obviously you or your students will have follow-up questions after a thread has been archived. Have no fear, there's a way to get previously archived threads back up and running!

Click on the pound sign (hashtag, octothorpe, whatever you prefer) in the top right of your course's #general channel:
On the resulting popup, click on "Archived" to see a list of archived threads. Then, click "Private" to see all of the private questions that have been asked. In a non-example situation, there would be a list of threads that you could click. All you need to do from there is to type in a message and the thread will be unarchived and opened for further discussion.