Messaging mechanics

Just want to drop my ideas about messages here.

  • You should be able to organize your messages to some extent. Being able to delete messages or group them together, archive them or star them could all be things to consider. A common problem on CS would be having to go back through pages and pages to find old messages exchanged with someone you don’t contact frequently . A “starred” or “favorites” folder could do the trick.
  • A way to show that messages have been read would also be excellent.
  • I noticed in group chats you can make someone else an admin. I think they should have to accept becoming an admin before you can transfer that responsibility and leave a group. This is because the person you make an admin may be inactive or may not want to be an admin.
  • Admins should be able to remove people from the chat.
  • Perhaps admins can choose a picture for a group chat too.
  • Once you leave a chat you should be able to rejoin it.
  • You shouldn’t be able to write in the text box after leaving the chat (even though it produces an error message now it doesn’t make sense to even be able to type in it.)

That’s all for now. Apologies if some of these were already considered or being worked on :slight_smile: hope others share their ideas too!

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Absolutely a good idea. In CS it is almost impossible to find the message that you are looking for. They only have the archive option. So yeap this would be a great idea for long term users.

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Good ideas. We’ve discussed being able to archive messages to hide irrelevant stuff. Probably a starred feature where they show at the top would also be useful. We’ll keep that in mind.

Are you not? What do you mean by this? If you leave the chat, someone should be able to invite you back in?

I know there’s a bunch of polishing that needs to be done in both backend functionality and frontend functionality/UI. We’re currently spending our dev resources on a few other things though and will come back to this a bit later!

I mean a group chat - someone can definitely invite you again but if you left the chat by accident it would be nice to be able to rejoin on your own :slight_smile: maybe the admin would have to accept that action.

Ah, like an “undo leave”? It currently takes like 3 clicks to leave: open the message settings dropdown, click on “Leave chat” and then confirm in the modal. We would have to add some backend functionality to get a list of group chat’s you’ve recently left, and some UI elements to go and undo the leave, and then do QA to make sure it all works! I think it’s more effort than it’s worth for now to add this feature?

This is unrelated to what Emily mentioned, but it’s also about messaging so I’ll put it here: I noticed that on the profile there’s no “message” button, only “request”. Sometimes you don’t want to request, you just want to send a message. Am I missing something?

You can request to stay with anyone, but you can only message your friends.

Mh… I don’t think that’s a great idea. Sometimes I message people or get messages from people just to hang out. For example: I’m taking a short trip, will stay in airbnb, but posted a public trip stating I already have a place to stay but blablabla and locals are texting me with tips and info, and to hang out when I get there. I do also sometimes message people that are coming to my city for the same reason.

Also: when I met someone and e are going to hang out again. I don’t like adding people I don’t know well enough as friends, because I meet lots of people just a couple of times, I don’t really know them. I like that about CS: the friends list is a list of people you really know and trust, if we limit messages to only friends we are going to end up with “friends lists” like the ones on FB, I personally don’t like that. It’s just an opinion, of course :slight_smile:

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It’s not set in stone yet. Users will probably be given an option to choose who can message them. A lot of people have said that unsolicited messages are a problem though, so we’re looking for a way to limit those.

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Ya to second what Aleja said, the way I used to use couchsurfing was all through messaging hosts or people who were around to meet up in the day rather than staying them right off the bat (cos I wasn’t comfortable staying with a stranger), and I found it was really great. I don’t think this should be the solution to the unsolicited messages because now it would just completely limit the usability

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I think having the option to hide your profile from search results (from everyone, from men, or from women - you’re not friends with ) will be part of the solution here: you can still message/request/use the site features in an incognito way, but only select people can contact you out of the blue. If that’s what you’re after.

Yes, probably! Let’s see if anyone else clamors for it :))

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What I’m really missing now (on CS as well) is a search function within messages/host/surfers, especially if you have hundreds of messages.

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Oh, so true. I would love a search function for messages also. It would be equally useful in communities later on! Please consider it @aapeli! @darren! @lucas!

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These are all related to the search functionality which we are still iterating on an early first version at the moment (backend done on this first version, the UI still to come!), so I think we can definitely take that into consideration as we extend it once we’re back into working on this area of the app!

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The way requests and messages are totally separate at the moment is far from ideal and we plan on changing it later.

But since it mostly works, we’re working on communities and search first :slight_smile:

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I want to drop my idea about community comments(messages) here. I couldnt find a topic about it. There is no edit or delete option on community comments. So it can be nice to add a button to edit your comments. What do you think?

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I might be wrong but I believe it’s because you are a “basic” user? I have been here for a while so I am already a “member” user and I do have an option to edit or delete my post. There is a symbol of a little pencil or trash can under my post to edit or delete the comment.
https://community.couchers.org/t/understanding-user-trust-levels/378

My post is not about Forum page, its about the app. For example, I ve written a comment on a post in Country group (community). So there is no edit or delete buttons. Is it also about trust level?

No, there’s no trust levels on the app. It’s just not implemented yet, but is certainly on the roadmap.

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I know updates to the messaging system are coming but in the meantime, how easy is it to implement a resizable reply field?
That is the thing that annoys me the absolute most right now when writing messages. I really want to be able to see the whole text I just typed and not only four lines at a time.

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