---
title: "Rooms and invitations"
source: "https://wparts.com/en/help/secure-rooms/rooms-and-invites"
description: "Creating rooms, inviting participants, history visibility, key grants and key epochs: what happens when members join or are removed."
---

# Rooms and invitations

## Creating a room

Approved sellers, moderators and staff can create rooms from the Secure Rooms page. The room name is encrypted with the room key - the server never learns it. Limits: up to 500 members per room, files up to 50 MB, up to 10 files per message.

## Topics inside a room

A room works like a forum section: the discussion happens in topics. A topic is a single question, and its replies live inside the topic rather than in a shared feed.

- A topic stays open until the question is resolved. New replies cannot be posted to a closed topic, but it can be reopened.
- Important topics can be pinned - they always stay at the top of the list.
- Unread items are counted per topic: the counter on a room card is the sum of unread items across all its topics.
- While you are inside a topic, new replies appear immediately, without reloading the page.

Conversations that existed before rooms moved to topics are collected in a separate "Conversation before topics" topic at the bottom of the list.

## Inviting participants and history visibility

When you invite someone, you choose how much history they will see:

- **From join (default):** the new member gets only the current key epoch and reads messages sent after they join.
- **Full history:** the new member gets all key epochs and can read the entire history.

Inviting a buyer is only available to platform staff, with a separate warning in the UI.

## "N participants are waiting for keys"

Key delivery is peer-to-peer in practice: only an existing active member can encrypt the room key for a new member. If nobody active is online when someone accepts an invitation, the new member waits - and active members see a banner "N participants are waiting for keys". As soon as an active member opens the room, their client hands over the keys automatically.

## Key epochs and member removal

Room keys are versioned as "epochs". A new epoch is created when a member joins, when a member is removed, or on manual rotation. When you remove a member:

- a new epoch is created, so the removed member cannot read new messages;
- the removed member still keeps whatever history is cached locally on their device - encryption cannot take back data that was already decrypted.

For this reason, remove members promptly when access should end, and assume that anything shared while someone was a member may have been saved by them.