Unable to Create a "General" Channel from Scratch in Teams Desktop

This is incomprehensible. And a multi-month fix to change a channel name? It may seem minor - but we have lots of existing Teams that use General - not gonna change nomenclature now.

I have already created the Team, and deleting and starting anew appears to take 30 days while I wait on the email address from deleted group to be purged so I can can re-use the current email address. That is also preposterous.

The forced non-General channel created is "Main" - is acting as General - it even said when I intended to change it that IF I changed FROM "General" I won't be able to change it back.

Need ability to have one General folder that is located at top of channel for every Team.

Thank you for prompt attention.

Hi Myles,

Not sure I fully understand what you mean but, this bug does not affect any of your existing teams.

It only happens when you create a new team and try to pick General as the name of your first channel.

In any case, there are a couple of workarrounds published in this thread:

1. Create your new teams from the Teams admin portal.
2. Create your new teams from the Teams mobile app.

In those 2 cases the first channel will be automatically named General and no questions asked.

I hope this helps

Josu

Hello - not sure if this still works, but I was able to do this on iphone a few weeks ago, and the mobile version of Teams still auto-creates the General channel as before. If you can USE THE TEAMS APP ON YOUR PHONE (not the desktop) - and it will only ask you to name the "Team" and will automatically add "General" as the first channel.
When using app on your Phone (for now, until Microsoft messes it up further) - you only have to enter the Team Name, and General Channel is set up automatically. Hope this helps - let us know if that doesn't work.

Frustrating and I wasted a bunch of time trying to address this little detail.

I finally sacrificed the Team name, blasted it, and started over from Sharepoint. Create TEAM site. Then go to Teams & Groups in 365 Admin >> Active teams and groups, Checkmark group - choose Add to Teams from top nav. It duplicates site to Teams with a General channel.

This is incomprehensible. And a multi-month fix to change a channel name? It may seem minor - but we have lots of existing Teams that use General - not gonna change nomenclature now.

I have already created the Team, and deleting and starting anew appears to take 30 days while I wait on the email address from deleted group to be purged so I can can re-use the current email address. That is also preposterous.

The forced non-General channel created is "Main" - is acting as General - it even said when I intended to change it that IF I changed FROM "General" I won't be able to change it back.

Need ability to have one General folder that is located at top of channel for every Team.

Thank you for prompt attention.

It was mentioned earlier in this thread that a fix is expected by Q1 2025. The original intended feature, to my understanding, is this one ( https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=&searchterms=395931 ). I have a few questions regarding the behaviors that will result from this fix:

• On Teams UI, will it create a default General and a named channel OR a default General channel only and then we can rename it?
• On the Graph API, will the call to retrieve the primary channel( https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/team-get-primarychannel?view=graph-rest-1.0&tabs=http ) correctly return the General channel, even if it was renamed?
• When renaming the General channel in the UI, does it rename the General channel folder in SharePoint?

Hi Christopher,

Not sure how it will finally work but I guess that:

• On Teams UI, will it create a default General and a named channel OR a default General channel only and then we can rename it? It will let you choose the name of the first channel but it will not throw an error if you to pick General as the name for this first channel. Please note that the current issue is that it does not let you pick General.
• On the Graph API, will the call to retrieve the primary channel( https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/team-get-primarychannel?view=graph-rest-1.0&tabs=http ) correctly return the General channel, even if it was renamed? I should think so, No matter what name your first channel has when you make the call, it will still be your first channel.
• When renaming the General channel in the UI, does it rename the General channel folder in SharePoint? Yes, that's the way it works now and MS has not mentioned any changes in that sense.

I Hope this helps.

Josu