Option to disable voice messages

Twi1ightSparkle commented 3 years ago

Is your suggestion related to a problem? Please describe.

I don't use voice messages so I consider the possibility of accidentally sending an audio recording of my environment to a room where it's impossible for me to delete it a security risk.

Describe the solution you'd like.

A setting somewhere that completely disables voice messages for me. Preferably (but possibly optionally?) saved to my account data and respected by all my sessions in all Element clients across all platforms.

Describe alternatives you've considered.

Deny microphone access to the Element clients and apps. Though this is not an ideal solution as I would have to explicitly enable mic access before and disable again after a call.
Disable the feature on the Synapse or reverse proxy level. Tho I can't immediately think of a way to do this. But if this is possible, it is also not a good solution in case I do need voice messages some day and this is not available to people that are not running their own server.

n3rdybyn47ur3 commented 3 years ago

I would like to go one step further: Blocking incoming voice messages or server side configuration. In general, features like voip or voice messages should have a possibility to disable them on the homeserver and the client. Some of my users are already denying the use of matrix because they are receiving too many unwanted voip calls. We need voip, so ther is no way around it. The numbers will increase when more and more people discover the voice message option. I wonder what happens to our storage if thousands of users start to send those messages. Voice messages are a great enhancement for some people but also limiting the usage. There are many situations where listening to audio is not possible while reading and replying to a text is ok. Hiding the voice message option in element (for web) is one option. But since the unmodified app is available for everyone, it’s not a perfect solution.

RokeJulianLockhart commented 5 months ago

https://github.com/element-hq/element-meta/issues/386#issue-1261512583

@Twi1ightSparkle, I believe that a use case for this is someone who is audiometrically impaired. They would want to discourage being sent voice messages irrespective of automatic captioning enchancements.

Twi1ightSparkle commented 5 months ago

Good point, I've added the a11y label as well

element-hq / element-meta