How can you tell when your Chats message has been read?
There doesn't appear to be any date/time read notification like you get on most chats.
In addition there's no clear distinction between your own messages and messages from the other person.
Best Answers
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For me, the distinction between messages sent and received in FS Chat is clear.
The background color of what I have written is blue, while the background color for the correspondent is grey. Perhaps not the best color choices since many may have difficulty discerning differences between similar shades.
On Windows 11, both Chrome and Firefox.
A small snip from the edge so I don't violate my correspondent's privacy: At the top is a from background; at the bottom is part of my reply.
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I appear to have misunderstood the OP's second point. I was referring to the list on the left hand side of the Chats section, rather than the back and forth messages within one conversation. I can't illustrate here (confidentiality issues), but it appears it's the message of the latest date that appears in the list, as I see some of the messages (as I scroll through) are from me and others to me.
Regarding the time / dates issue, I received a long-awaited reply yesterday. On the left side of the page the actual date appears (May 28), but this appears both as "2 days ago" - yet also as "Thursday May 28th 2026" ( yesterday's date) in the conversation itself, where my last message is shown as "4 months ago". That side of things does appear to be a bit muddled!
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Regarding the question of how you can tell if a chat message you sent has been read:
- On the website's implementation of Chat, it's true that there is no indication that a message has been read. Some people have speculated that this is because of privacy concerns, but I don't think that's the case, because of the next point.
- On the Family Tree mobile app implementation of Chat, there is indeed an indicator. Here's a test message I sent to someone last year. Note the double checkmark just to the left of the time. That indicates that the recipient has read it. If it were a single check mark, that would indicate that it was successfully sent to the Chat server, but that the recipient has not yet read it.
So if it's really important to you to determine if a recipient has read a message you sent, there is a way: use the Family Tree app to look at the message.
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On your first point, I believe that is probably connected to privacy issues. Some individuals would not want you to know if or when they had read your message and that is their right. As an example, an old work colleague of mine once harangued me (next day) for not immediately responding to his "urgent" message, whereas I had merely opened it, got distracted, then went home without having read it (till the next morning). You wouldn't even know if the addressee had read it: for example, perhaps their partner shared their account and was the one who opened / read it. In summary, I don't think you would gain much by knowing your message had been opened: perhaps only getting unnecessarily annoyed if there was no response.
On your second point, I agree that the distinction between messages received and those sent is not immediately clear. However, I have the same experience with messages on my phone: where those both sent and received are lumped together - so the problem is hardly unique to the FamilySearch Chats set-up.
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the Chat function appears to be "a work in progress" but I don't know if any of these issues are being worked.
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It appears that I've been mistaking a chase-up message that I sent for a response from the other person. Below is a screenshot with user ids blanked out. The 2 years ago message is my reply to what I thought was a response from the other person (the 3 years ago message), but which it would appear was actually my first chase up message.
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Thank you, It's not that important.
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I've deleted all messages in all my chats as it's fairly clear that nobody's read any of them. I think the people I was trying to chat too aren't actually distant relatives (except one, a third cousin), just people entering new records (sometimes badly), adding new people to the familysearch tree, and sometimes doing incorrect merges.
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