Please remove the artificial pin limit

duck-rh commented 3 years ago

Bug Description

I'm not allowed to pin more than 4 conversions despite no real reason to do so.

Steps to Reproduce

pin 4 conversations
try to pin a 5th one

Actual Result:

you can only pin up to 4 chats

Expected Result:

Be able to pin any number of conversations. Nowadays people have wider and bigger screens and such limitation is totally artificial. There is also no reason to impose "for your own good" limitations. For these reasons I do not consider this a feature request but a bug, since the feature is there but broken on purpose.

Platform Info

Signal Version: 5.1.0 (Signal's Debian package)

Operating System: Debian unstable

Linked Device Version: not relevant

hiqua commented 3 years ago

The limit also applies to mobile devices, and pins sync between devices.

I suspect the limit is to ensure that a new unread message in a non-pinned conversation will always appear somewhere on-screen to prevent users from missing them due to too many pinned conversations.

4 is arbitrary but it works well in practice. It could be increased to min(70% *screenSize for all screenSize across devices) and thus depend on the user's devices but that's more involved...

duck-rh commented 3 years ago

When I set them up, not so long ago, they were not synced, so I had to choose for each device which one to keep first. It make sense a first glance to sync them but what if you share a phone for both work and friends, then you would not be able to prioritize depending on the device, Anyway, if the pin limit is increased that would stop being a problem I think.

hiqua commented 3 years ago

I see how increasing the limit would solve your particular case, but how do you deal with users not seeing new messages from non-pinned contacts because they pinned too many discussions? Or do you think that wouldn't happen in practice?

Regarding the pin sync, I think it's recent. It works the same with archiving by the way (from what I could test).

duck-rh commented 3 years ago

I'm not a UI expert but here what other Android apps have done:

Weechat uses a bell that displays some kind of counter and you can tap on it to check the next private conversation with updates
Matrix Element has a specific tab for notifications (they separate direct messages and room messages in tabs too) which displays only conversations with changes
Nextcloud has an Activity tab with some kind of feed and you can click on individual items to jump to the file/image/conversation/… And that's just the few apps I'm using daily, therefore I think there probably are other methods to deliver updates to the user.

stale[bot] commented 3 years ago

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

duck-rh commented 3 years ago

Still current.

itsrachelfish commented 2 years ago

I've got a lot of bitches on tinder and I need to be able to pin more than 4 chats

It doesn't matter if I need to scroll down to see the rest of my unread messages. So long as the notification icon is displayed whenever I have new messages why does it matter?

@hiqua It sounds like you're really concerned about the edge case of somebody pinning a bunch of conversations and then not realizing that they're pinned and not knowing that they have to scroll down. That's a stupid user problem. Don't restrict the app for everyone because of a fear that someone might get confused.

Adding more than 4 pins is something that several people have requested here on GitHub and reddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/idm2mq/conversation_pinning_restriction/

You could just make this variable a configuration option in the app settings - https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/blob/fb9a9b7c96fe4a3403f6b54441d32dcd00220d3b/app/src/main/java/org/thoughtcrime/securesms/conversationlist/ConversationListFragment.java#L196

Then I could go into the settings and increase the number of pins I want to have. And if I somehow manage to forget how to scroll down the page it will be my fault for increasing the limit.

hiqua commented 2 years ago

Your "stupid user" stance goes against their development ideology and as such is unlikely to make the devs change their mind about this. I too would like to be able to pin more conversations, but I don't think your suggestions will be considered because of that.

In any case, this thread is the right place to continue this discussion.

itsrachelfish commented 2 years ago

@hiqua Thanks for the links! Now that I understand their development ideology I think it would make sense if they totally redesigned the way pins & group conversations are displayed :sparkling_heart:

But that's a lot more complicated than just giving us a setting :sweat_smile:

idleberg commented 10 months ago

I don't understand why the developers of Signal make it their problem. If people, for whatever reason, prefer more pinned chats, that's their problem – not Signal's. I do appreciate a lot of design decisions, but I think one also has to respect individuality. People use things differently.

goranovs commented 3 weeks ago

Signal is cool, but sadly, after 3 years this issue was not addressed. Devices have bigger screens nowadays and this is a user-unfriendly experience, to be limited for "some reason". We have notifications, etc. There is no way to miss anything. The user can have more than 10 unread chats that won't fit on the screen anyway. The next thing could be to limit my message length to 10 words max because the user can't read longer sentences. 😀

Also, it would be nice if we could drag already pined chats to order them.

signalapp / Signal-Desktop