So, here’s a nightmare scenario: You open your business Recession On your phone so you can DM with a few colleagues. You talk to this group regularly, but you don’t see the chat in the active DMS list on your phone, so you select all participants individually to pick the conversation back up. Without thinking much, you accept a strange prompt asking, “Do you want to include your entire chat history?”
Because yes, you think, of course your chat history should include the group DM you’ve been chatting in for ages. Who has time for this? There is work to do! Essential facts to convey! But the answer here is no, you don’t want to do that. Because if you do, you’ll have moved on Your entire DM history with the first person you selected to chat in the DM group.
This is not hypothetical. In fact, this screw-up happened to me recently when I tried to take on two of my bosses, Brian Barrett and Tim Marcheman. Suddenly, Tim had full access to years of private conversations between Brian and me, with no obvious way to undo them. “Lmao Andrew,” Brian wrote, “what did you do.” “
dead. I was, in that moment, a blur of embarrassment—and worried that I had made a disastrous mistake. I couldn’t even explain what happened, let alone explain it away.
Once I realized I wouldn’t be escorted to HR and my heart rate dropped back to normal, I was determined to find out what went wrong and warn the world against making the same mistake I did.
Turns out, this is definitely not a feature of the recession — it’s a bug.
“This sounds like an issue with the mobile app implementation,” Slack spokesman Vince Beung says via email. “Sometimes when you switch between desktop and mobile Slack, recent conversations (including DMS Group) don’t immediately appear in your mobile DM list until the app syncs.”
Since my group DM with Brian and Tim didn’t show up in my chat list, Bitong adds, “The app treated this as creating a new group chat. That’s why I got the chat history prompt — it was asking if you wanted to include your chat history with The first mate in this new group.”
My next question, of course, was how Slack users can ensure this never happens — and what to do if it does. “You can do this in a number of ways,” Byung says. First, manually pull up to update the app. If that doesn’t work, close the app completely and reopen it. This should cause your DM list to be up to date, which avoids the issue.
Also, as mentioned, if you see “Do you want to include your entire chat history?” Prompt to a DM group you know already exists, remember to click No. (And even for a new group DM, think very carefully about what might be lurking on that date before getting involved.)