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.
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Suphatra
104 comments
Comments are closed-
Damien
commented
My friend Jack wants this too! :D
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Mariel Haddad
commented
We have the same issue in our teams
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Anonymous
commented
We often have people accidentally create a new thread when intending to respond to an existing thread. It would be nice if we could drag that new thread into a previous one (where intended).
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Yves Rausch
commented
Very often me and other people in the team answers to a thread in wrong input (new thread). Instead of answer to an existing thread they start a new one then.
After doing this I want to be able to move such an answer to an existing thread to correct this.
This is even useful if I want to merge to threads into one... -
Brittany
commented
I am trying to get people on board at my organization, but it is resulting in messy conversations. As the previous commenter noted, people are tending to start new conversations rather than replying to an existing thread. As the team owner, I would definitely appreciate the ability to "clean up" my conversation tabs (and the ability for others to merge their own conversations/threads if they realize they've made a mistake).
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Phil Brandvold
commented
This would also be very helpful for changing culture - most people are used to IRC or email, and just add new conversations instead of replying to threads. Having the ability to merge will help control this during the transition to threaded conversations in teams.
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davidb
commented
I agree that the UX could be improved a bit to make it more obvious for the user to select between "Reply to a conversation" or "Create new conversation". However there will always be situations where the user will use the wrong option and there should be an easy way to merge a message with an existing conversation... Whether it's by dragging the item or a menu option.
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Wojtek
commented
Threads on channels are very good feature. However, would be good to have an option to merge two threads, e.g. in case sb has accidentally started new one instead of hitting reply, and people started to reply there. Or in case the team realizes two threads are actually about the same thing.
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Anonymous
commented
Often, I want to reply to a thread, but accidentially start a new thread by using the wrong input field (and get fried by colleagues for doing so...). It'd be awesome if you could move your own posts (that just created a new thread) into the previous thread.
I'm using the Mac Desktop client.
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David Grayson
commented
Once again, I like the drag idea, but all I really care about is some way to get a reply onto the original message. I just saw a string of 8 differnet posts where people forgot to use reply what a mess.
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Silvio Di Castro
commented
Great idea, I would say, move to another channel too!
Some threads start in General and soon develop to be their own thing, to deserve a channel. That's where this could come in extremely handy. :) -
Anonymous
commented
We find people are often starting a new conversation instead of posting within a thread because of the layout of the screen. They think they are in the thread but they are not. This causes the channel to be unorganized and messy. Right now you have to delete and re-add to keep the thread together. It would be super-helpful to "merge" a conversation into an existing thread.
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Pascal Soell
commented
It would be great if we could extract certain posts from existing threads into a new thread -- or even another existing thread. For us, people sometimes continue to talk in one thread about multiple things, and if you (as as admin/team owner/the user itself) could move that post (and the following posts?) into a new thread it would help de-cluttering the whole discussion and focus on a certain topic.
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Mark Noble commented
Since it's up to the user whether or not a reply is in a thread or not, I wish that by dragging it to a thread it would send them a "suggestion" that the reply be added to the thread. Then they could decide - and they might remember to click "Reply" next time.
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Carmelo Migliore
commented
We also struggle with that in my company. Channels become unreadable because of that confusion between starting a new conversation and replying to a previous conversation.
Even if you figure out a way to decrease the confusion, I think we will always benefit of means to clean the channel.
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Jelle
commented
I hope this gets more points because in my organisations this happens A LOT. Most users know they need to click the "reply" button but as they are using the chat function a lot more they always use the lower bar (new conversation).
If we could moderate this. Merge using drag and drop or whatever system this would help a lot to keep the conversations clean and readable.
Eventually you should figure out how to prevent user from making this mistake.
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Zane
commented
Until you guys fix the UX of replying to threads vs starting a new conversation this would be a great feature to implement so we can quickly fix posts by people who make new threads instead of replying to the original.
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aparmley
commented
Excellent point and I'm voting for this or something similar to be implemented to help manage and clean up chat...
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Dustin Hedges
commented
This would be FANTASTIC! New adopters of the "Threaded Conversation" style often just start a new conversation because the text box is in the same location as an individual chat. This feature could help clean up threaded conversations that get broken up because people weren't paying attention with which chat box they are typing in.
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Kyle
commented
Teams is seeing pretty great adoption in our IT organization but there are some folks that struggle with the threads concept and frequently enter replies to threads as separate conversations. This can really create confusing discussions to follow in our channels.
Right now I do a lot of polite messaging 1 on 1 to help people with this. It's no fun because people don't like to feel like they're doing the wrong thing, and it makes them also have a reason to say they don't like the tool.
I already have a suggestion (or have voted for) to allow admins / owners to re-thread messages, hopefully through some drag and drop method.
I think though you guys should take a more aggressive approach in handling these users who are struggling with the threaded concept. I think it would really benefit all your customers and your adoption strongly.
If you could detect when users appear to be replying, but are actually starting new threads, and maybe pop up an alert saying hey, you were just replying to a thread, but now you're about to start a new one, did you mean to still be replying to the thread? Or maybe this is a job T-Bot could do, helpfully messaging people with pictures / gifs showing them how threads should be used.
I think this is a big UX/adoption opportunity and I would love to see you guys pursue it!