Hi!
I’d like to ask about the combining / merging / concatenation behaviour of sequential / consecutive messages. First of all, I’m not sure about the terminology to be used for this feature, thus I’ve put all these keywords into the topic.
I can see this was coined about 3+ years ago and added somewhat after: Unite messages of the same user – Mattermost Feature Proposal Forum
This is a fairly common feature of most messaging platforms, from Skype through Facebook to Slack, to not display the username and avatar again if the same user sends messages without any other user posting anything between. This makes a lot of sense, and there’s no problem with that.
However what I’ve noticed is that this merging behaviour goes a bit too far in some cases. For example I had a new user joined our team around 2am, than another on around 8am. We have had no other activity in the town-square channel between these two time, so when I look at it now, it looks like both users are joined at the same time, because the two system messages have been merged.
Long story short merging is good, but there should be a time limit, e.g. if there’s more than 5 minute difference between two messages, do not merge them or so.
Afaics this may be a separate thing for each client type: I can see the same behaviour on Android and Web clients right now, not sure about the rest.
Anyone any thoughts on the topic?