Read Receipts, Read Markers, Notifications don't behave well with reactions and edits

[bwindels]

@jryans has analysed in depth, and here are the key changes to make right away:

• When sending read receipts, consider these relations as displayed when received and advance our read receipt past them so that any possible notifications are marked as read
• When displaying read receipts, they should be “rewound” back to the last visible event if set to a hidden event ID

Future work:

• Message Editing: Change default push rules to not send notifications for edits
• Aggregations: Tweak read marker advancing behavior

[turt2live]

Shouldn't these be using custom event types that don't trigger notifications in the first place?

[bwindels]

Shouldn't these be using custom event types that don't trigger notifications in the first place?

I thought this was also a problem for m.reaction events, not 100% sure though. Also, not sure what an edit would look like if it's not a m.room.message...

[turt2live]

oh right, edits are part of the problem. Nevermind that then.

[uhoreg]

see also #3511 (which was a similar issue, but for redactions)

[jryans]

I have attempted to analyse the various issues at play here. I'll update the original comment here to cover the most critical changes we need to make and open additional issues for follow up work.

[Valodim]

I was surprised about the small amount of activity on this issue: Reactions are beginning to pop up here and there from folks who enable the feature in labs, and this causes inexplicably incorrect unread markers for everyone else (although thankfully at least they don't trigger actual system notifications on riot-android).

Unreliable unread markers have a potential to be extremely disruptive to the overall user experience. Please don't underestimate this as a source of frustration for users of (even slightly) outdated riot versions.

[ara4n]

if you follow the link in the previous comment you’ll see the activity switched over to a googledoc. this issue is the main pending issue right now with reactions, and as such is being actively worked on, and at top prio

[Valodim]

Great to hear, that clears up my worries! Thanks for your work, really looking forward to this feature 👍

[lampholder]

Popping a phase:1 label on this to represent that its resolution blocks the delivery of the MVP

[jryans]

The critical bugs in this area which led to stuck notifications, etc. should now be fixed on develop (matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk#3056, matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk#3059).

If you are still seeing issues related to this, please open a new issue so we can investigate separately.