Remove the "Reaction previews" Labs flags

[daniellekirkwood]

We have 2 labs flags for message previews. They appear to be stable, so let's take them out of Labs!

Users do not need to be able to toggle these, we should show it for everyone
We should update the copy so it's clear what's an emoji message event and whats a reaction event (see comments)

We need to:

• Understand why they're in Labs
• Check with other teams if there's a reason for them to stay in Labs
• Understand with the design team where these settings should live (if anywhere, see here )
• Do the task...

[daniellekirkwood]

@amshakal @VolkerJunginger

As per your document discussing what shows up in a message preview and what doesn't... Should these toggles exist for users, or when we remove them from Labs should we default them to on for everyone in both cases? (If we do move the toggle, where should we move it to?)

Secondly, right now we don't show the difference between an emoji in the timeline and a reaction in the timeline. How are y'all showing that on Element X?

[turt2live]

fwiw, the history on these was they were a developer-designed feature of the "new room list" back around the Riot->Element rebrand. Shortly after that rebrand, they got moved out of the message preview algorithm and into labs because people relied on them but the majority felt it was spammy/miscommunicated.

Several years later they've never really had a fair chance at being considered features again.

Personally, I'd love to see them as real features. I use both flags in nearly every room I'm in to stay up to date with what's going on and watch for incidents potentially requiring moderation (as a T&S moderator myself).

[VolkerJunginger]

We should show a preview for the case that

• the users reaction on someone else's message was the last event in the room: you reacted [emoji] to "[message]"
• An other user reacted to the users message and that message was the last message in the room: [user] reacted [emoji] to "[message]"

If a user send an emoji we would just display the emoii. Like any other message.

[daniellekirkwood]

@VolkerJunginger : I think the scope of this issue is to either show reactions or not show reactions, regardless of whether the reaction was on the last message in the room or not.

We do want to update the preview text to show:

• You reacted [emoji] to [message]
• [user] reacted [emoji] to [message]

@weeman1337 is it straightforward to add "[message]" to the preview where [message] is the content of the message the user reacted to? Or do we need to shorten it to "you reacted with [emoji]" & "[user] reacted with [emoji]" ?

Also, @VolkerJunginger & @amshakal I assume that we do not want to show the toggle and that if the user sees previews they always see reactions in this way?

[VolkerJunginger]

We should not have a setting to change the preview behaviour.

[daniellekirkwood]

Awesome.

If we want to open a new ticket to only show reactions on the most recent event in the room, feel free to open that as a new issue here. I think y'all have delayed work on reactions though so that might not be necessary.

@weeman1337 We're good to go! I will update the main content of the issue to reflect the decisions made in comments but ping me any questions :D Thank you!

[daniellekirkwood]

lol i didn't read the comments here and it looks like @t3chguy already actioned this... !