From coordinating pickups for road trips to helping organize yard sales, WhatsApp groups are at the center of all kinds of events in people’s daily lives. As someone who’s a member of far too many WhatsApp groups, I’ve always been very annoyed by the app’s inability to show group chat history to new group chat members. In the lead up to my most recent meditation retreat, the admins ended up sending the same document seven (!) times, just because new members kept joining the group and they had no way to access attachments that were previously sent to the group chat. Thankfully, WhatsApp is finally changing that.
WhatsApp is finally adding a feature called Group Message History, which means that group admins and members can now choose to share recent messages with new members. Now, when adding new members to a WhatsApp group, you’ll be able to let them access up to 100 recent messages already sent to the rest of the group chat, which should good enough to stop people from spamming the group with the same messages as new people are added.
Speaking personally, this will be a great quality of life upgrade. In order to help new group chat members feel less lost, I’ve previously done everything from forwarding all relevant messages to them via DMs to sending screenshots of all our previous messages. All of this is incredibly tedious, and thankfully, I won’t have to do it for much longer.
Credit: WhatsApp
I also like the idea of limiting new group members to 100 recent messages or less. Quite often, my WhatsApp groups start off with a small number of people who know each other extremely well, and then the group expands to add acquaintances. The dynamics of the group chat change significantly when newer members are added, and not everyone feels comfortable with the idea of an unknown person seeing messages that were sent with a more intimate group in mind. Limiting chat history is a great move that allows people to maintain some privacy, as opposed to sharing the group’s entire chat history with every new member.
Still, if 100 messages seems like too much of an invasion of privacy to you, WhatsApp also says that admins will have the option to disable this feature for regular members. This way, only the admin will be able to share chat history with new members.
What do you think so far?
The company says that everyone in the group chat will be notified when a new member is granted access to chat history, so you won’t be blindsided if your new group member starts referring to in-jokes from a few days ago.
WhatsApp says it is gradually rolling out this feature across the world, so you can expect it to be available on your device in the coming weeks.
