Don't show all contacts in conversation list, show active conversations

[erikw]

Bug description

Desktop app shows all contacts having Signal in the conversations list, but the app does not. The app only shows started conversations in the list, and so should the desktop app. The app way of accessing friends who use signal with a "new message button" is preferred.

Basically align the desktop app with the mobile app :)

I'm using:
Signal: 1.13.0
OS: Arch Linux, macOS

[scottnonnenberg-signal]

You can remove a conversation from the left pane by clicking on it, and then choosing 'Delete messages' from the top-right menu.

[erikw]

Sure. Then this bug report should instead be "don't automatically create empty chats, in the desktop app, for all contacts you have on Signal when you create a new Signal account".

[pchclx]

"Sure. Then this bug report should instead be "don't automatically create empty chats, in the desktop app, for all contacts you have on Signal when you create a new Signal account"."

+10000

it takes 5min for Signal to start up on my PC. totally insane.

[scottnonnenberg-signal]

@pchclx Wow, that sounds like it should be a new bug! If you provide your debug log (View -> Debug Log) we can work on making that startup faster. Thanks!

[pchclx]

edit: posted my issue into a new thread

[scottnonnenberg-signal]

@pchclx Yes, this is a true hijack. I would have preferred a separate issue before we got into it. But here we are.

Thanks for supplying that log. What I'm seeing is something I've seen lately from people who are frustrated with the startup time - lots and lots and lots of contact syncs, where your mobile device is sending all of its contacts to desktop to keep it up to date. I presume your mobile is an Android? Can you tell me about the other apps on your phone? Also, can you think of anything that might be modifying your contact database on the phone for you? Or are you modifying your contacts yourself?

[scottnonnenberg-signal]

One other question: what is your usage pattern for desktop? How long is it between sessions, generally? I'm noticing some 404 errors trying to download attachments, and those URLs expire after 30 days - you're not waiting that long in between sessions, are you?

[pchclx]

I'll start a new thread- apologies to the OP!

[EleanorRagone]

Any update on this?

[scottnonnenberg-signal]

There's a new ability to archive conversations in the top-right menu when you have a conversation opened. That should help keep the left pane nice and clean. :0)

[erikw]

@scottnonnenberg-signal
The thing is that what is archived in the app is not respected for a new desktop client connecting. If I set up Signal on a new desktop (or reinstall with data wipe on the same computer), I have to manually open each and every conversation (most empty as there is no chat history) go and archive in the top right menu. This is a lot of work!

This is what this issue is about.

[scottnonnenberg-signal]

@erikw Do you often need to start over with your desktop installations?

[erikw]

@scottnonnenberg-signal

Since I first opened this issue, maybe 3-4 times. But even 1 times is annoying enough. It's not a nice UX to be spammed with empty conversations for all address book contacts when starting using the desktop app :)

[dharcourt]

IMHO this is not a feature request, it's a bug. When users install signal on their desktop, they do not expect their conversation view to be spammed by dozens of names of people in their contacts who they do not usually use Signal with. I can only imagine that the developer who wrote this feature in this way either communicates using Signal with most of the people in their address book (reasonable if they're a Signal developer, but probably not the case for most Signal users), or has a small address book. For people with several hundred people in their address book, the way this currently works makes the left-hand conversation view in Signal desktop almost useless.

Of course one can go and delete these non-conversation conversations (those corresponding to people in our address book who we don't usually use Signal with) every time Signal desktop is reinstalled. It takes 4 clicks to delete each conversation. Multiply that by 150 contacts who use Signal, and you get 600 clicks. Requiring users to click 600 times every time they install Signal desktop is IMHO a bug.

Another sign that this is a bug is that Signal iOS and Signal Android don't work this way. I suspect they avoid doing that exactly because of the usability problems described above. This should probably not be considered acceptable behavior for Signal desktop either.

[ninjit]

IMHO this is not a feature request, it's a bug. When users install signal on their desktop, they do not expect their conversation view to be spammed by dozens of names of people in their contacts who they do not usually use Signal with. I can only imagine that the developer who wrote this feature in this way either communicates using Signal with most of the people in their address book (reasonable if they're a Signal developer, but probably not the case for most Signal users), or has a small address book. For people with several hundred people in their address book, the way this currently works makes the left-hand conversation view in Signal desktop almost useless.

Of course one can go and delete these non-conversation conversations (those corresponding to people in our address book who we don't usually use Signal with) every time Signal desktop is reinstalled. It takes 4 clicks to delete each conversation. Multiply that by 150 contacts who use Signal, and you get 600 clicks. Requiring users to click 600 times every time they install Signal desktop is IMHO a bug.

Another sign that this is a bug is that Signal iOS and Signal Android don't work this way. I suspect they avoid doing that exactly because of the usability problems described above. This should probably not be considered acceptable behavior for Signal desktop either.

Very much a bug - empty conversations should not be created for all imported contacts

[kenpowers-signal]

What distinguishes bugs from feature requests is unexpected behavior vs expected behavior which can be changed. Since Signal Desktop is behaving as expected in this case, it is not a bug, but a feature request.

[yringler]

It's not such a complicated request, if it's aggreed that it should be done it shouldn't take more then 5 minutes (from someone who knows the codebase).
It's already sorting by most recent message, so just filter also.
It's javascript, so something like

allcontacts.sort(x => x.date).filter(x => x.count > 0)

This is probably involved, or where this is being called - IDK, I don't have much expirience in react, just taking a quick look on the GitHub.

Signal-Desktop/ts/components/LeftPane.tsx

Line 544 in 5c810c6

conversations={conversations}

[tanyanghan]

Bump. This is still happening in the current version v1.39.4.

I just installed and signed up to Signal on my phone and started a few chats in the phone app, and then installed Signals for Desktop and all the contacts are showing on the left instead of just the few chats that I had started in the phone app.

It's not a feature. It's a bug.

[jorisw]

Agreed. As a first time desktop Signal user, I am thoroughly underwhelmed with Signal because of this. I now have a boatload of conversations with contacts whom I never talk to, on the left side, each of which I now need to delete via the top right context menu. Edit -> Delete doesn't work on Mac either, and even if it did, I can't shift-select a bunch of them to delete them all at once.

@yringler I don't think it's something that needs filtering. It's the pre-population of the conversation list that needs to be removed.

@kenpowers-signal It's neither a bug nor a feature request - it's a design flaw. The behaviour is intended by the developers but not expected by the users.

[yringler]

Indeed. Also, possibly loading all those 100s of "conversations" is what causes the slow initial load time.

[yringler]

[jorisw]

All kidding aside, if anyone wants to work on this, the 'initial fetching' of conversations happens here:

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/blob/development/ts/ConversationController.ts#L712-L718

Though it's possible that this is necessary to have the contacts available at all.

[jorisw]

Some instructions towards a workaround - such as editing the SQLite database - would also be appreciated.

[edfungus]

I did some digging around and I found that message conversations show up when the active_at field is set. I believe that is here.

I then found this bit of coding relating to active_at stating:

  conversation.set({
    ...newAttributes,
    // We force this conversation into the left pane if this is the first time we've
    //   fetched data about it, and we were able to fetch its name. Nobody likes to see
    //   Unknown Group in the left pane.
    active_at:
      isInitialDataFetch && newAttributes.name
        ? finalReceivedAt
        : newAttributes.active_at,
  });

(code location)

That seems like the cause of this issue? I'm not sure how to test this though since as far as I know, I can't setup a fresh account on staging. When I link from production as standalone, all the conversations are already loaded as well. Thoughts?

[jorisw]

All I needed to do to reproduce the error IIRC is to go into the Preferences and reset the data for the app (big red button at the bottom).

[edfungus]

Hm, are you reproducing in staging? The data reset also unlinks your phone and according to the docs not being linked to a phone makes testing things like contacts and groups difficult. (And afaik to link with a phone, I just copy over the data from the production app but that already has the conversations loaded)

I guess I could setup a build of the Android app going to staging to test this but if you are able to reproduce, I rather not setup another whole dev environment

[briatte]

Bump. This is still happening in the current version v1.39.4.

I just installed and signed up to Signal on my phone and started a few chats in the phone app, and then installed Signals for Desktop and all the contacts are showing on the left instead of just the few chats that I had started in the phone app.

It's not a feature. It's a bug.

Can confirm this is still happening in v1.39.6 on macOS 10.13.6.

Very disturbing, especially since some contacts with whom I have had zero interaction keep coming back to the sidebar. I keep archiving them, but they keep coming back.

[ArneNostitz]

+1 billion
yes please - i have more that 2k contacts - and the yload up every time i open the app - and then im flooded with "note to self Error" msg
this cant be that hard to change in the desktop version? please

everyone is switching to signal now - but the mac app is a nightmare.
also the fact that it only syncs when the phone is active is kind of old school whatsapp - and i dont see the benefit of needing your phone to send digital msgs. but thats for another thread

[jorisw]

@kenpowers-signal Please reconsider your tagging of this as a feature request, clearly users do not expect this behaviour.

[miltonhowe]

Bump. I am literally considering going back to WhatsApp for this.

[stale]

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.

[yringler]

This shouldn't be closed. Semantics doesn't make this a feature request - the behavior as defined is flawed.

…

On Thu, Sep 23, 2021, 5:54 PM stale[bot] ***@***.***> wrote: 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. — You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#2505 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AA7B3KOO4F4ST4FLVANYRMTUDOOYZANCNFSM4FILQXCQ> .

[jorisw]

It baffles me how unreceptive the Signal team is to this issue.

[scottnonnenberg-signal]

New versions of Signal Desktop show nothing in the left pane on first link, just your pinned conversations if you have any.

For those of you who linked Desktop in the past, we have no current solution for you. It would be pretty intrusive to go into all of your contacts and hide things already in the left pane. Please let us know if you have thoughts there.

[jorisw]

New versions of Signal Desktop show nothing in the left pane on first link, just your pinned conversations if you have any.

Sounds good.