63

I am trying to keep the full list of people in the "Direct Messages" sidebar, in order to permanently be able to see who's online and start a conversation with these people when I need to.

I could accomplish this by clicking "Open a Direct Message" to add each member, but Slack actually keeps reducing this list in a mysterious way, despite the setting "in the sidebar, show all my channels and DMs".

Does anyone have an idea how to fix this?

Giacomo1968
  • 53,069
  • 19
  • 162
  • 212
sahbi
  • 631
  • 1
  • 5
  • 3
  • 1
    I noticed the same thing. My guess is that it removes DMs with no activity after some time. – Erik Kalkoken Apr 16 '17 at 14:10
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-3eGt_Oc-s – Alita Jan 06 '22 at 00:40
  • A sort of poor man's workaround .. If you use the + (New message) and enter the same discussion participant(s) .. then the message history will show .. trouble being that you might not remember the discussion participant(s) combination .. Maybe Slack will address and correct this at some stage .. i.e. a "Show all" type of option .. – Allan F Oct 26 '22 at 01:16

2 Answers2

48

Here's what I got from Slack support:

I can confirm that what you’re experiencing is expected behavior, which I’m happy explain. Once you have more than 11 direct messages (DMs) or group DMs open, any additional direct messages are expected to fall off the list if the DM is not opened during your current session, there has been no activity in the DM in the past week, or there are no unread messages in the DM.

I’m afraid there’s currently no way to turn this behavior off, I’m sorry for the frustration this has caused you. I certainly can see how it would be useful to be able to view all your DMs listed in your sidebar. I’ve gone ahead and shared your experience with the right people on my team.

In the meantime, you can star all your key DMs to keep them all listed in your sidebar (:star: icon under a member’s name at the top) or quickly pull-up a conversation by using the quick switcher, Cmd/Ctrl + K.

Community
  • 1
user914108
  • 481
  • 4
  • 3
  • 19
    I have the same problem. That's kind of silly to say but I should say that is an issue for me as well because sometimes I don't remember the names of individuals at my organization but I would know if I saw it. So I have to do more work to try and figure out what the name of the person that I spoke with is. – FernandoZ Jan 07 '20 at 15:14
  • 10
    It also happened to me. I need to speak with some person I have spoken in the past, but I don't remember his name and I can't find him on the list, as he's already dropped. In my opinion it's a big ux issue – Ramon Vasconcelos Feb 22 '20 at 16:32
  • 3
    I'm glad I'm not the only one. Really annoying behaviour. The worsen it all, the guy sent me the message, not the other way around, so I have no clue how was he called... – Lucas Lima Apr 16 '20 at 17:30
  • 1
    same here :D. I think in a large org it's common that you remember someone pinged you about something. But don't remember the name. It's very frustrating to not be able to browse the full list of DM – Cyprien Autexier May 13 '20 at 02:50
  • 2
    It's also handy to see the status of all the team members. The DM list is also the "who's online right now" list because it shows their status. Slack should stop being so flippantly Applish about this. – Luke Griffiths Nov 06 '20 at 23:30
  • is there any solution from slack on this?.. this is really painful to loose all the DMs history, Sections and more. – Deepak Raj Jan 05 '21 at 04:57
  • 1
    i found a hack meanwhile.. below steps will show up all the past DMs history during edit.. 1. Create new Section from Direct messages three dots icon 2. After creating Edit Sidebar – Deepak Raj Jan 05 '21 at 05:03
  • I have the impression that DMs in custom directories/folders don't vanish on their own. Perhaps one can just move all the DMs into some folder to have them saved. Additionally one can always browse the All DMs tab, there I can find all DMs, though not in such a compact way. – Martin Ueding Feb 04 '21 at 10:31
  • oh wow this is just amazing, you can have dozens of useless channels open but if you chat with more than 10 persons (quite common in my case) those disappear, very intuitive and smart ;) – magor Oct 01 '21 at 07:20
  • This is so unconvinient. I had a DM with collegue 2 weeks ago. I don't remember his name and now I can't find it... – wintercounter May 20 '22 at 14:08
  • i don't know this description from Slack support is entirely true. for example, i see users in my DM list that i haven't chatted with for more than two months while others i've interacted with recently have fallen off. is it about how you "star" certain DMs that matters? is it a matter of when your DM got added? like, i go back to my list to find someone i am looking for and find they're not there... only to find someone i haven't DM'd in months is still there. i don't understand, but maybe just need to clear out my DMs :) – mysterlune May 21 '22 at 06:40
  • Wow this is terrible. Hard to believe a modern app would lose content from stuff as recently as two days ago: i can't get a message and now am stumped how to track down a problem report and the person I had been discussing it with – WestCoastProjects Jul 22 '22 at 22:54
11

A workaround for this issue is to add every conversation to a section. For conversations I rarely use, but don't want to lose, I just have a section called Unsorted.

If you follow the workflow of moving all new DMs into a section you should never lose that conversation. That is until they are deactivated after leaving your company and auto-hidden (but that's a different annoying issue).

notedible
  • 1,259
  • 1
  • 9
  • 4