Drag chat messages to merge them into one reply thread
Since a lot of people type messages in quick succession, it'd be helpful to have the ability to drag and merge them together into individual "reply threads".
Alex Chantavy
shared this idea
Thanks everyone for the clarifications to this request. Upon further technical review, we have decided to decline this request at this time.
Please continue to contribute your ideas — they push us to innovate, problem solve, and really understand your needs.
Thank you!
Suphatra
104 comments
Comments are closed-
Simon
commented
Ditto on make the UI to avoid these better
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Marvin Dickhaus
commented
If you're declining this idea, please optimize the UI such that those mistakes just don't happen in the future.
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Anonymous
commented
Bummer this was declined! Our organization was really looking forward to this. Probably the single most important request for us right now. Also, there is very little context on the rationale for this decision which makes it a little more difficult on our end too.
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Anonymous
commented
i started a new thread asking who want's to have a beer after work.
5 people started new threads instead of replying to the existing one.this suggestion needs to happen.
FAST! -
Martin
commented
+1 for Pascal's comments.
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Kimm Viebrock
commented
+1 for temporarily addressing a UI problem (and long-term addressing any other relevant use cases that would remain afterward) by making it possible to merge comments that exist as new threads into replies to an existing thread
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Pascal Soell
commented
Hi Warren. Yes, my original idea was to include a way to merge or move certain responses with/to another thread.
As already mentioned in some other answers, this is mainly due to insufficient UI design. Therefore, users often create new threads in channels instead of replying to existing threads.Furthermore it can happen that users sometimes accidentally answer the wrong thread - here the user, the thread creator, the team owner and/or an admin should have the possibility to move the answer to another thread.
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Ariel Sibley
commented
Yes, merging threads within a channel is the ask. However, I agree with @Kyle that the issue stems from poor UI design. I think there are a few issues:
* When the bottom of the thread isn't visible, the reply button on the thread isn't visible either, but the Create New Conversation chat box is always visible, so it looks *very* much like this box is to reply to what the user is currently seeing.
* The reply button is hard to see vs. the create new conversation box, which is quite visible.
* It is too easy to create a new conversation. You should need to press a button to create one. -
Anonymous
commented
Use case:
Someone starts a thread to discuss a particular topic. Instead of hitting the reply a reader starts a new thread responding to the discussion, and hits send. Dragging the new conversation to the original thread would join the two together.Coming out of a meeting where a topic is discussed two users start to create a discussion/conversation in MS teams about the same topic. the ability to join these two discussions on the same topic by dragging and dropping them together (merging them.) would be invaluable.
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Poseidon2600
commented
Hi Admin - your assumption is correct. This is to deal with the user tendency to create a new conversation vs. posting a reply to an existing thread.
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Kyle
commented
yes, in a channel. We need weapons to deal with Teams' disasterous thread design in channels. About 10% of the people I work with understand how to use Teams 'properly' and not use the 'Create a new conversation' compose box to reply to existing threads. Everyone else just creates threads with their replies, and our channels are a huge mess. We're either playing thread police, making people delete and re-post their replies properly (thus making them never want to use Teams again because we've made them feel stupid) or channels just decend into anarchy. The *right* thing would be for you all to actually fix this incredibly user hostile design, by for instance removing the 'create new conversation' compose box *entirely* from channels, forcing people to click Reply under threads, and forcing new-thread-creation as an explicit action under a "New" or "+" button. But as long as you insist on having at least 2 compose boxes on screen at any time (again, this is INSANELY BAD UX), you need to offer admins weapons to police threads without badgering people about it.
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Anonymous
commented
@Admin I am definitely asking about targeting threads within a channel. The UI in Teams makes it easy to start a new thread instead of replying to an existing thread. We get this ALL the time. This means that the whole conversation is sometimes spread out and because conversations move within the channel based on the latest response it makes it extremely difficult to keep all the info on a single topic together. If we could drag a misplaced response to the thread then the continuity would be preserved providing greater clarity in the discussion.
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Don Petit
commented
Yes, this would be for merging or moving replies within a channel conversation. Thanks
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Jake
commented
This is absolutely for within a channel.
Another topic that was merged into this also asked that replies can be broken out into a new thread. Different people have problems with always replying as a new thread, and starting a new topic as a reply to an existing thread.
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Jason R
commented
Warren, From my perspective this is about merging conversations within channels. It would be very helpful when folks are starting new conversations when they should be replying to existing conversations.
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Wojtek
commented
Warren, yes, if you ask me it is all about channels, not messaging. See the png attached to this idea. Also, by now, quite a few ideas, including one added by myself, have been merged into this one. My idea was definitely about channels.
Perhaps it should be moved to "Teams and Channels" area. -
Andrew Edney
commented
As with the other replies, this is specifically in channels, either because someone clicks on the wrong bit of the UI so starts a new conversation when they meant to do a reply (so being able to drag it into place would be great) or someone posts something not realising that there was an existing conversation on that subject and so you want to pull that post into the existing conversation.
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Sean Ellis
commented
The key point is that the multi-threaded conversation UI is an anti-pattern that positively encourages people to create a new thread when they actually want to reply to an existing one.
This needs to be fixed properly, but in the meantime, there needs to be a way for people to put right the error that they have been encouraged to make.
So the immediate requirement is to be able to associate the new thread with the message for which it was intended to be a reply. The simplest way to do this is to have a drag-and-drop interface.
It would then be nice to allow this to apply across channels too (in case someone replies in the wrong channel, for instance), although that has additional considerations because different people may be in different channels. For a good drag-and-drop solution this would require us to have multiple windows open at once - but this is also something that needs to be fixed anyway.
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Anonymous
commented
Yes, because it is easy to open a new thread instead of replying to an existing one.
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Anonymous
commented
Yes. If reply accidentally creates a new thread then need to have an option of merging threads.