Ability to mark messages as unread

[Half-Shot]

In a similar vein to email, it would be good to mark a message you plan to go back to as unread so you can focus on other things. Currently the way people work around this is read messages from their notifications and avoid clicking on the room to clear the unread marker. Obviously, this means the user cannot interact with the room in any way in the meantime, aside from it being intuitive.

The simple solution I would propose is a room-account-data item, which simply lists event_ids in an array. When marking a message as read, the eventID is entered into the array. Clients should take this into account and increase the rooms unread counter by this number, as well as highlighting the message in some way.

The eventID should be removed from the array once the user has indicated that the message has been read.

[turt2live]

https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/4406 appears to be the canonical issue for discussing this, so preferably would want to keep the conversation there. There's also matrix-org/synapse#2632 matrix-org/synapse#5601 to track Synapse's implementation.

Will leave this open to track the spec side though. Definitely needs an MSC.

[Half-Shot]

ta for the links

[srdjan-catalyst]

Would it be acceptable then to have an additional m.fully_read_force or similar for clients to send in case we deliberately want to push m.fully_read marker backwards? That way standard flow is not affected, but we can cater for a deliberate action?

[turt2live]

The fully read marker doesn't affect unread status, unfortunately. The read receipt does, which cannot (and should not) be rolled backwards.

[srdjan-catalyst]

Thanks Travis, this really is a different issue. The idea here is to force fully read marker back, which would allow clients to jump back. I'll create a separate issue, unless you have another suggestion.