So here's a nightmare scenario: You open your work Slack On your phone so you can DM with a few coworkers. You talk to this group regularly, but you don't see the conversation in the list of active DMs on your phone, so you select all the individual participants to choose the backup conversation. Without thinking too much about it, you accept a strange prompt asking, “Do you want to include the entire chat history?”
Because yes, you think, of course it should include the chat history of the group of DMs you've been chatting with for a long time. Who has time for this? There is business to conduct! The truth needs to be communicated! But the answer here is no, you don't want to do that. Because if you do, you will be transferred Your entire DM history with the first person you chose to chat into the DM group.
This is not a hypothesis. In fact, this incident recently happened to me when I tried to DM two of my bosses, Brian Barrett and Tim Marchman. Suddenly, Tim had full access to years of private conversations between me and Brian, with no obvious way to undo it. You can write, what have you written.
Die. At that moment, I was consumed with confusion and worry that I had just made a catastrophic mistake. I can't even explain what happened, let alone explain it away.
When I realized that I wouldn't be escorted into HR and that my heart rate had dropped back to normal, I was determined to find out what had gone wrong and warn the world not to make the same mistake I did. get.
Turns out, this is definitely not a Slack feature, it's a glitch.
“This sounds like a mobile app sync issue,” Slack spokesperson Vince Bitong said via email. Sometimes when switching between Desktop and mobile Slack, recent conversations (including group DMS) don't appear immediately in your mobile DM list until the app syncs.
Because my group DMs with Brian and Tim didn't appear in my list of conversations, Bitong adds, the app treated this as creating a new group chat. That's why you got the chat history prompt, it asked if you wanted to include your private chat history with your first colleague in this new group.
Of course, my next question is how can Slack users ensure this never happens and what to do if it does. “You can go about this a few ways,” Bitong said. First, manually pull down to refresh the app. If that doesn't work, completely close and reopen the app. That will result in your DM list being updated, which reduces the problem.
Also, as mentioned, if you see people you want to include the entire chat history? Prompt for a DM group you know already exists, remember to click Zero. (And even for a new group of DMs, think very carefully about what might be lurking in that history before you share.)