Aggregations: Handle failures when sending

[manuroe]

From riot-web created by jryans: vector-im/riot-web#9692

(see current status below)

[manuroe]

After chatting with @nadonomy about reactions / edits errors in general, we came up with:

• Use same e2e (!) icon to decorate messages with an error
  • Clicking on it reveals a context menu with any of:
  • Resend reactions
  • Resend edit
  • Encryption information
• Users will see the message status bar explaining the error (network, rate limited, unverified, etc.)
• Irrespective of what colours e2e uses (as its subject to change), unsent edit/reactions should always decorate red

Extracted from Editing / Reactions UX doc.

[manuroe]

But I'm not sold on the wisdom of mutating the existing (!) from a 'there are encryption things you should know about' indicator to an iteractive 'there are errors on this message you need to do something about' component - at the very least this will be a tricky migration with many users not discovering the new functionality :\

[manuroe]

@nadonomy's plan above actually covers both reactions and edits, so I'll relabel the issue.

[manuroe]

The edits/reactions/redactions/local-echo work has raised a couple of issues that need rapid resolution:

• edits/reactions/redactions do not have a 'pending' state in the UX
• edits/reactions/redactions do not have a 'failure' state in the UX

This is a bigger problem for edits and redactions than it is for reactions (it is considered generally more important for a user to know if an edit or redaction has failed to persist than a reaction)

@nadonomy's proposal above is certainly worth exploring; in his absence though I'd like us to consider the simplest possible change we can make to convey the missing information. This is a proposal for what that might look like:

• pending actions:
  • represent pending edits as the new message text, but faded (color: #ddd; as per 'sending' message)
  • represent pending redactions as the original event body, but faded (this could work for images as well as regular messages)
  • just represent pending reactions with local echo
• failed actions:
  • represent failed edits as the new message text, but red (with the (edited) marker next to them) - it already works like this:
  • represent failed redactions as the redaction lozenge, but red?
  • represent failed reactions, or failed redactions of reactions with a red border around the reaction?

The ⋮ menu should then have the any necessary resends available as a context-menu option - resend edit, resend redaction, or resend reaction

We'd also need to modify the wording of the error message; something like:

Some of your messages, edits, reactions or redactions have not been sent.

[Resend all]() or [cancel all]() now. You can also select individual messages to resend or cancel pending actions.

[manuroe]

My motivation for the above was to see how far we could get stretching the existing 'faded == pending, red == failed' language to edit, reactions and redactions. At this stage in my thinking I am very much not convinced that stretching the existing language is the right approach - it could be that an 'error icon' based approach is clearer and simpler to implement.

[manuroe]

Also I just remembered that red == mentioned as well as red == failed, so I'm even less convinced that stretching red to cover all these sorts of failures is a good idea.

[manuroe]

Notes from group discussion:

• Pending = alpha, Error = red
• When there's an error of any kind, mark the message with (!). Also keep text red as we do now.
• (!) has context menu as described above
• For sending errors (unlike E2E errors) the (!) icon should always be full alpha (not just full alpha on hover)
• Don't need to show pending state for reactions
• It's okay that pending and editing are the same low alpha
• Failed redaction can go ahead with red candy bar
• Nad will redesign the redaction icon overall
• Room status bar should always appear and it's okay to call everything "messages" (even for edits, reactions, redactions)

[manuroe]

After another round of discussing, including Matthew, we landed on:

• the above is a good idea
• we might still want the "error resolution" e.g. send and cancel options in the context menu
• switch bings to just highlight the bing word rather than the whole line, to prevent confusing it with a send error.
• long-time users might be trained to ignore the (!) unknown devices error icon already, as it is very common in e2e rooms. So let's not touch it as described above until cross-signing lands and it should be unexpected to see it. Matthew suggested changing the icon when we finally do so, but unclear how we can change it in a meaningful way as it's already fairly generic.