Introduce starred messages

There should be the feature to starr (flag) important messages in some way.
It should be possible to see/search starred messages in a separate chat or view or similar.

Unfortunately existing basics for using this feature has been deleted from core with PR #1965.
Database is still having a column to handle that.

I would be very happy to see this feature again in core and usable in UI.

thanks for your feature proposal :slight_smile:

worth mentioning here, as probably not all forum users follow all discussions on github: we currently have a Saved messages chat where you can forward messages to save to. by latest android release, this is only two taps.
this is not totally the same as starring, however it has the advantages to work better with disappearing messages (shall starred messages disappear?) and also has some benefits as the original sender is removed (in case your phone gets seized).

for sure, starring also has its benefits, no questions, but as we had these “Saved messages” already it was easier to go that way (nb: starring was never present in the UI, we did remove only some dead code that was never used anywhere - and that bit could be restored easily, just in case one day we also add starring :wink:

Hi @r10s thanks for your comment :slight_smile:

I think to make your statement “round” we should point out the differences between a) “saved messages” and b) “starred messages”.

First of all “saved messages” is the same approach as sending an email to yourself. This is an easy approach and often used.
When you do this you have the email’s context into the email so you are able to understand it later. When you’re doing this with delta, you take the message out of the context (chat). Later maybe difficult to understand.

“starred messages” is a way to highlight (or flag) a message and leave it into it’s context. This approach gives you the possibility to show starred messages together or only find them more quick AND to have the context.

I think both approaches are worth to have and as starring in principle is very easy to implement (but maybe a problem for multi device usage) we should implement it sooner or later.

As the core supported “starred messages” for years, why we go a step backward now?

As the core supported “starred messages” for years, why we go a step backward now?

the code in core was maybe 5% of overall effort needed to support all systems. it was never fully implemented and tested nor complete. search, starred-view, multi-device was not solved, and the whole ui on the different os was missing. plus ux-questions as mentioned above. also, if needed, the code can be restored. so, we were never close to having this feature, only very few was done. it was maybe a bit as (a) “finish” starred in time X? or (b) go for saved-messages in a fraction of X?

apart from that, everything’s right. of course, we know about the differences and there were lots of discussions before.

ux- and implementation-wise the current approach was easier to implement, that’s all. things are always in competition with other things. as said, maybe one day, we have both - or even more we cannot even imagine today :wink:

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Thanks for this answer. Basically I’m with you :+1:

Maybe I’m getting the time this year to start a basic implementation :slight_smile:

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What would be needed except database support?

  1. an UI function to set/reset a starred status of a message
  2. a special chat which shows starred messages (or similar)
  3. a FFI extension for data exchange ui-core

That sould be all for basic support?!

multi-device is an issue to be solved, esp. as saved-messages support multi-device. i think, this is the most complicated part. this is also the thing that blocks broadcast-chat, btw (that is also simple when leaving multi-device out).
so maybe it makes sense to do a general thing for multi-device sync beforehand.

exactly that is the issue I expected to come up now :wink:

But is it necessary to block an easy to implement and useful function because of a multi device issue? At first, we could declare this function for local usage only.

I suppose there are many people out there which would love it in that way, isn’t it?

A multi device solution would require some kind of sync message (for DC clients only?!)

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