If a room is password protected and also hidden, the only way to join it in Spark is through Actions > Join a conference and the press Create or join room. This is a very confusing design, though i have seen this in other jabber clients i think. Someone was lazy to create two dialogs So as i side note probably there should be two buttons: Create a room and Join a room (along with Join selected room, though it is not needed as you can just double click room's name to join it). But so far at least a bug should be fixed. Spark doesn't ask for password, if the room one tries to join is hidden. If a room is listed then upon trying to join it via Create/join button it will show the password field. It doesn't show this field when a room is hidden.