How do I delete a chat?
The new chat feature in Family Tree shows a long list of prior chats. The list is getting unwieldy, and I would like to clean it up by deleting particular chats that I am done with. There seems to be no way to delete a chat. When I click an old chat in my list of chats, I see three dots. When I click that it shows details, and that I can mute a chat, or hide a chat, or block a chat. I don't want to do any of those things. I just want to delete a chat. I don't see any way to delete a chat that I don't want to see any more.
Answers
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The difference between deleting and hiding is rather subtle. What about the Hide Chat feature doesn't meet your needs? I find that hiding a chat is sufficient for me.
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You must have a great lot of chats since 2022. The ones before that had been purged.
Yes there, WAS a way to delete a chat/message in previous version. I don't see that now. Sometimes I get very unwanted chats that need to be DELETED, not hidden.
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@W D Samuelsen contact me please said "Sometimes I get very unwanted chats that need to be DELETED, not hidden."
Can you help me understand what problem you see with hiding a chat? When I hide a chat, it's gone from my list. If I had a feature to delete a chat, it would be gone from my list. I can't see any difference, aside from the terminology.
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Abusers
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If you're concerned about abusers, then you can use the Block feature, which is superior to anything the old messaging system provided. It will not only hide the chat, but also prevent any future messages from that person from arriving in your chat list.
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Abusers have different accounts. I know because I had to deal with one who create new ones and even new IPs to get around the blocks by Abuse department.
Why saving by hiding. DELETE !
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I haven't used the new chat much, but I do have to wonder if the use of the term Hide is deliberate because that is all we can do? Delete implies that the chat is deleted completely from the FamilySearch servers which probably can't be done from a documentation stand point. Delete also implies that the chat is removed from everyone else which really seems totally unacceptable. If I'm in a chat with four other people and I decide I want to leave the chat, hiding the chat would take me out of it. Deleting the chat would delete it for all of the other four people. That can't be allowed.
Think of it like e-mail. When you "delete" an e-mail you just remove it from your computer. You don't delete it from all the servers it passed through while getting to you and you certainly don't remove it from the computers of the person that sent it or from other people that received it.
FamilySearch really is using a more accurate term when they say "Hide" instead of "Delete." Very little on the internet is ever really deleted. It's just hidden and can always be found again. That's how all those internet way-back machines can work.
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Servers hide them and seen only by the supervisors.
I do NOT want to see it in MY chat where it will ALWAYS be there, unless DELETED.
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Looks like it is really hard to un-hide a chat. All I could find is that you have to remember who the person was in the chat and send a new message to that person.
I hid a random chat that I didn't need any more before I read the instruction and did not take note of who it was actually from. Since I now have no way to un-hide it, it is effectively deleted.
The chat is still present for the other person, of course. I can't delete stuff away from somebody else. But for me it is gone forever unless that person messages me again. Then I would have to both re-hide and block that user if I don't want to hear from that person.
So, again, I would maintain that hiding is a better term to use than delete to remind us that what we write is never gone for good and never was even when the term delete was used.
But I wouldn't have any problem if it made people feel better if they went back to using the terms delete and undelete rather than hide and un-hide.
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In the initial rollout of Chat, not all features were implemented on mobile apps and the website at the same time. The mobile Family Tree app (either iOS or Android) does have a feature for unhiding chats (under the top-level Chat Settings), but the website doesn't have that feature yet. Hopefully that will get rectified at some point, but in the meantime, if you would like to recover that chat that you unintentionally hid, you can use the Family Tree app to do so.
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@W D Samuelsen contact me please said: "I do NOT want to see it in MY chat where it will ALWAYS be there, unless DELETED."
Have you actually tried to hide a chat? In my experience it is then gone from the list.
We can quibble over whether the term "hide" is more appropriate than "delete" -- I personally prefer "hide" but I wouldn't be terribly upset if it were changed to "delete." But unless there is something very strange about your setup, the feature you want already exists, albeit perhaps with a name you don't like.
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OK, I see Unhide there on the app. So it's more like moving an e-mail to the trash but never emptying the trash. In that case, it does seem reasonable to be able to remove chats from the Hidden list to more completely hide them if I never want to see a particular user's name again.
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If you are interested, there is more about the Chat feature in the announcement 💬FamilySearch Chat is Now Live!!!
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@W D Samuelsen contact me please said:
"Abusers have different accounts. I know because I had to deal with one who create new ones and even new IPs to get around the blocks by Abuse department."
Even if you could delete it then the abuser could just send you another message, which gets around the deletion. Plus, if they are using a new account, then that's what they are doing anyway, it wouldn't be part of the old thread. So, effectively, deletion is no better than hiding in this regard.
That said, even when it was called "Delete", I highly doubt it was actually removed from the servers. The recipients could presumably still see the messages, even if it's gone on your end, so it would still have to be stored somewhere.
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I've been playing around with a chat between me and my wife and discovered a wrinkle that has not been mentioned here. And I have to take back everything I have said.
Hiding is nothing like deleting.
If I start a new chat with my wife and we send a couple of messages back and forth then she hides the chat so it no longer appears on her list, it is, of course still fully visible on my list. If I then send her another message in that same chat, it automatically unhides the chat for her and she has the whole thing there again.
Regarding blocking, If she has blocked me, I still get a green dot that tells me she has her chat window open. I can send all the messages I want and there is no indication I am blocked and that those message are not visible to her. However, if she unblocks me, then all the messages I sent her while blocked appear for her reading enjoyment.
It seems that if I am blocked by her, she should vanish from my list of chats, I should not be able to find her in the directory, and I should not be able to send her any messages.
There really should be a delete function that will completely get rid of an unwanted chat.
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@Gordon Collett said "Hiding is nothing like deleting."
It actually is very similar. And if you're comparing it to the old Messaging system, it's almost exactly the same. With the Messaging system, if you deleted a conversation (obviously just your side of the conversation) and then another participant sent a message to you, the conversation would get reactivated. That's the same as with the Hide Chat feature in the new system.
I don't understand why there seems to be dramatically greater concern with the new system over a feature that is identical (but only with different terminology) in the old system.
It sounds like people are hoping that the Hide Chat feature would have more lasting effects on interaction with a specific person. But that's what the Block feature is for, and that's available now. If that's your expectation, use the Block feature.
And as for blocking, it seems that your expectation is backwards. My blocking of someone limits what I see from them. It has no effect on what they can see of me. If I block you, I have no right to expect that you will no longer be able to see our conversations -- that would give me far too much control over your data.
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As I am looking more at the new chat system and trying to view it from the point of view of everyone that has posted about their concerns, I do find I have fluctuating feelings about it. Part of the trouble is that I hardly ever used the old system. I never knew that in the old system:
"Deleting" was nothing like deleting.
So is it good they changed the name so people would realize what is going on.
I would have assumed in the old system that deleting a message would have deleted that message thread just like when I delete an e-mail. It is, of course, possible that when I delete an e-mail the person who sent it to me would take the last e-mail he sent me, forward it with a new addition, then send the whole thing back to me. That is not what most people do because it is too messy. Most people would start a new conversation with a new e-mail. Apparently that is not possible in a chat. You apparently can never end a conversation just continue it. I guess that's why it's a chat.
I also don't use Skype much, but is that how Skype works, also? Or can you have a Skye conversation, stop and delete that conversation, then restart a new conversation with the same person without the old conversion coming right back?
In any event, I would prefer a system in which, when a conversation is done and no longer needed I could get rid of it for good and then if I needed to talk about something else with the same person be able to start with a clean slate.
Regarding blocking, I would not, in fact, expect that I would have any control over someone else's data in that blocking them would delete our conversation from their data so I must have expressed myself poorly. But I would hope that blocking a person would block his view of me in the chat system and block his ability to send further messages to me. Otherwise he will send message after message with his blood pressure climbing with each message I "completely ignore." A polite little "You do not have permission to message this user" would be nice.
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One of the (many) things I hate about my phone is how all of the text messages to the same person are inexorably grouped together. I can't keep a conversation about what was for dinner four years ago separated from the conversation about medieval naming customs, and I can't get rid of the former while keeping the latter.
On FS, I'm unlikely to discuss either dinner or medieval anything, but I could, theoretically, want to discuss different topics with the same person. For example, I have a distant cousin on my mother's side who has roots (on a different branch) in the same place as my spouse's ancestor. If we were to stick to communicating on FS, we'd be forced to discuss those completely-unrelated topics all in the same thread.
Like Gordon, I made and make very little use of FS's internal messaging: neither the old nor the new system suits my purpose. Given the discussion here and in the announcement thread, I'm left wondering whether either system suits or suited anyone's purpose.
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One thing about the Messaging system/chat system, SEVENTY FIVE OR MORE percent, no response from "Them".
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Just a question. Would you personally like to know if the messages were never read or if they were read and ignored or if you were blocked?
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That I would like to know.
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@W D Samuelsen contact me please In the mobile app, there are checkmarks next to the messages. If there is one checkmark, the message was successfully sent but has not yet been read. If there are two, your message was read. As for why that isn't on the website version, I have no idea. That still doesn't say if you were blocked, I suppose, but it at least tells you if they've seen it.
@Julia Szent-Györgyi said:
"On FS, I'm unlikely to discuss either dinner or medieval anything, but I could, theoretically, want to discuss different topics with the same person. For example, I have a distant cousin on my mother's side who has roots (on a different branch) in the same place as my spouse's ancestor. If we were to stick to communicating on FS, we'd be forced to discuss those completely-unrelated topics all in the same thread."
You actually can have multiple conversations going with the same person at once, the UI just doesn't do a good job at conveying it. The new messaging system is designed so that there are multiple threads grouped under a person... but since threads look exactly like messages, it is hard to realize unless you pay close attention. So in a conversation with twelve messages, most people, in my experience, would create twelve threads with one message instead of one thread with twelve messages.
To open a thread, you either press the reply button under the thread (on the website) or press and hold the thread and tap the reply button that appears next to it (on mobile)
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Still does not like it. Can't delete the other messages to me.
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@W D Samuelsen contact me please Have you actually tried pressing the hide button? It seemingly functions exactly how the Delete button did in the old chat.
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no, in old chat, delete and that is end of it. I do not want to build up a huge hide file of those I do not do anymore. ESPECIALLY when the chat issue is resolved.
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@W D Samuelsen contact me please That's not how "Deleting" works for a program like this. They still had to store it, because the other person still needs to be able to see it. According to some of the posts above, it also brought back the previous messages if someone sent a new message in the old chat. So the only thing that changed was the name.
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The difference, I do NOT want to see any hidden ones that can still be reopened, period.
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@W D Samuelsen contact me please FamilySearch has never allowed that, as far as I can tell. Deleting was just Hiding under a different name.
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I didn't see how to delete a Chat as I read through the information on "How do I remove a Chat?" I did not put my information in correctly, and I would like to remove what I put in. How do I remove this Chat?
Thank you
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@LindaMBurns I'm not 100% sure I understand you correctly, are you saying that you sent a message but something in the message was wrong?
If so, then the option to edit or delete the message is available, by clicking the three dots under the message and then selecting the desired option. (If the feature is available on the app, I can't figure it out. As far as I can tell, it has to be done on the website.)
As to whether or not a deleted message is deleted on the other side, I'm not sure. If I had to guess, the answer is yes, because it's the one specific message, not the whole chat, and the name wasn't changed to "hide", but I don't know for sure.
If you are referring to deleting the entire conversation with someone, you cannot do that--you can only hide it, and since it doesn't get hidden for the other person, it that wouldn't remove anything you said that was wrong. (Although, deleting a chat wouldn't delete it for the other person either, because of course the other person still needs to be able to access the conversation, so that also wouldn't solve the problem.)
I personally think the best option would be to either edit the message and notify the other person of the mistake, or to just send a new message correcting what you said earlier. (If a new message isn't sent, they won't be notified, so they may just read the old message and never check again.)
In case you meant that you sent a message to the wrong person, I would probably just send a message explaining that you didn't mean to send it to them, and then hide the chat.
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