Add option to only consider message events for marking unread

[jryans]

It would be nice to have an option to only consider message events when marking a room unread.

This would ignore things like display name changes, avatar changes, join / leave, etc. for unread status.

[turt2live]

Note that stickers are messsages too

[a2sheppy]

Certainly things like name changes and join/leave should be ignorable. What would really be lovely but would involve more UI work and would be a bonus: a set of checkboxes to specify what to ignore from things like display name changes, topic changes, avatar changes, join/leave, stickers, edits of existing messages, etc.

Some of those things might matter more to some people than to others (such as channels where stickers are used to vote on polls and the user is managing one or more polls).

[Legogris]

+1 on this;
With bridge puppets and 1000s of bridged conversations (like mautrix-messenger), Matrix/Element gets unmanageable due to regular floods of join/leaves/room avatar changes from the bridge puppet.

Even better would be to be able to set this on a community-level, but a global setting can at least make that scenario usable.

[t3chguy]

As part of ftue notifications project this is changing

[turt2live]

#862 was an aspect of this from the legacy world

[MadLittleMods]

Related issues:

• Add ability to be notified on all text messages, but *not* state events #256
• Need the ability to prevent people being notified by my name/avatar changes element-web#1544
• Add option to show avatar/displayName changes only for direct chats #337
• Only show joins, etc. for users that have been recently active #1633
• Hide messages displaying changes to room avatar/name/topic and other loud messages … #1089
• Inactive rooms become logs for changes to member avatars/display names element-web#5479
• Rooms incorrectly marked as unread element-web#10954
• Room appears unread when receiving hidden events - RR not sent element-web#4947
• 'All Messages (loud)' setting considers room avatar change and leaves stuck notification element-web#3561

[chagai95]

I have some double-puppeted bridges (wa,tg,fb and signal) I think display name changes and avatar changes are sometimes buggy, and I just wanted to disable seeing these. After changing the settings in preferences to ignore both, I noticed that I have a bunch of chats always coming to the top - I found out it's because I have "show rooms with unread messages first", turns out this message is misleading, it's actually not messages but more like events... I think this option should be mapped into these preferences respectively and "Show join/leave messages (invites/kicks/bans unaffected)" perhaps for the joins, for big rooms but honestly that does not really make a big difference since there is always gonna be noise from big rooms anyway....

It took me a year to find this out because I did not see any new messages and thought it was a bug, as soon as I turned on display name and avatars I realized:

[chagai95]

The even more annoying part is that in order to clear these I need to go to each one of these chats and wait to all the events to load - this sometimes takes a long time for each chat and until I did this I can't use the super useful shortcut to switch between unread chats (alt shift arrows)

[chagai95]

I recorded a video of what I'm experiencing:

https://chagai.website/displayname-avatar-changes-marked-as-unread-messages.mp4

[3nprob]

Mirrors my experience quite well. UX impediment compounded by that certain groups reappear as unread after a while despite no new events (separate issue) so it becomes a regular exercise.

[AlexLJordan]

Is this the main issue for all the other related ones listed above?
It infuriates me to no end, when avatar changes or name changes in groups bring that room to the top of the list. It even shows it as a little dot indicating its not a "pinging notification" i suppose, so apparently it is known that i actually am not interested in this? I have disabled all relevant available settings namely "show avatar change" and "show display name change" but apparently that doenst work in groups or bridged rooms (which apparently count as groups as there are more than 2 participants).

After having opened the offending rooms, they stay up in the list, even though they have no messages warranting them a higher rank in the "sort by activity" list. So when a bridge changes the names of half of my contacts or updates their avatars i suddenly have 20 chats with no activity in front of my regularly used chats.

Also my aunt changes her avatar 5 times a week. I shouldn't have to be tempted to move her to low-priority just because of that. SchildiChat on android doesnt mark rooms/groups unread because of avatar or name changes, there everything works as i'd expect it to.