This article covers how school-level location filtering works in Finalsite Chat, including how the location dropdown controls what a district or school admin sees in the module, and how a channel's assigned school can be changed after creation.
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💡Quick answers
- What is location filtering? A setting that filters out individual schools instead of the whole district. A school admin sees and manages only their own school's conversations. A district admin keeps the full district-wide view, with the option to drill into any single school.
- Where does the location dropdown appear? In the CMS Chat Admin header, next to the Chats title. It persists across the Overview, Moderation, Chats explorer, Email digest opt-outs, and Members tabs, so the selected school stays in effect while navigating between them.
- What shows up in the dropdown? Only schools that have at least one chat channel. The location picker used to create or reassign a channel is different: it lists every location, including ones without channels yet.
- Can a channel's school be reassigned? Yes. A location can be set when a channel is manually created, and changed later from the channel's details if it was filed under the wrong school. Either way, that choice locks the channel's location going forward.
- Does this affect independent or single-site schools? No, in practice. This is controlled by a per-client setting rather than something that happens automatically just because a client has one school.
In this article
- The location dropdown
- District admin and school admin views
- Assign and reassign a channel's location
The location dropdown
A location dropdown appears in the Chats module header. District admins can select All locations or drill into any single school; school admins see only the school or schools they're assigned to.
- The dropdown displays on every tab in the module. The selected school remains selected while navigating between tabs.
- Only schools with at least one chat channel will appear in the dropdown list.
| Tab | What displays when a school is selected |
|---|---|
| Overview | Analytics for selected school. |
| Moderation | Flagged messages from selected school. |
| Chats explorer | Rooms and direct messages tied to selected school. |
| Email digest opt-outs | Opt-out records for selected school. |
| Members | People associated with selected school. |
District admin and school admin views
Behavior adapts based on who is signed in.
| Role | Default view | Can select another school |
|---|---|---|
| District admin | District-wide, all schools | Yes, any school in the dropdown |
| School admin (one school) | That school, fixed | No dropdown; the view is fixed |
| School admin (multiple schools) | One of their assigned schools | Can switch between their own assigned schools only, never others |
Assign and reassign a channel's location
- Manual assignment locks a channel's location. Whether it's set at creation using the location picker, or changed later via reassignment from the channel's details, a manually chosen school is locked and never changes on its own, even during the nightly sync.
- Automatic assignment applies when no one has manually set a location, including for auto-created class channels. These are re-evaluated as membership changes and during the nightly sync, until an admin manually assigns a location, at which point they lock.
- Fallback rule for automatic assignment: if the creating admin belongs to exactly one school, the channel is filed under that school. If they belong to several schools, or none, the channel is treated as district-wide and only appears under All schools until an admin manually assigns it a location.
⚠️ Important Note
Reassigning a channel's location does not retroactively re-check its members. If the channel now includes people outside the newly assigned school, review membership manually.
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