Add a way to turn off notifications for group chat(s)

[ossguy]

As far as I can tell, there appears to be no way to silence notifications for new messages in the user's group chats, while still receiving notifications for new private messages. The only options are effectively (using iOS' native app settings): notification on all new messages (group and private) or never notify of new messages ever.

This can cause many users to simply turn off all ChatSecure notifications, which often means they just never use ChatSecure again.

Apologies if I have missed a setting somewhere or an existing ticket - I searched through the MUC/group chat tickets but could not find one that seemed to cover this issue.

[chrisballinger]

Technically there's an internal setting for isMuted that was added recently, but there is no UI exposed for it yet. It's stored internally as a date property with the idea that you could mute for 1 day or whatever, so it will require a small bit of UI work to add a duration picker.

[ossguy]

Is the UI work you mentioned scheduled for an upcoming release? Just curious so I have a rough idea of when I'll be able to poke my friends to try out ChatSecure again. :)

[raucao]

There seems to be another issue, which is that it's not possible to get notifications only for username mentions, which is usually what you want in a group chat.

[galfert]

There seems to be a UI setting for completely disabling notifications for group chats now.

A config for still/only getting notifications for mentions would be really great.

[raucao]

Is there any way we could crowd-fund this feature or something?

[mimi89999]

It would require big changes on the server side first. Anyway, the way push notifications work in MUCs is a hack and needs to be changed.

[galfert]

I don't have any experience in iOS development, but as far as I understand iOS 10 introduced the UNNotificationServiceExtension. It allows the app to process/modify the content of the notification before it's shown to the user.

The only change that is necessary on the server for this to work is to add "mutable-content" : 1 to the notification payload. The rest can be done in the app.

[chrisballinger]

I looked into it when it was announced, unfortunately refactoring to use UNNotificationServiceExtension would be a massive undertaking for negligible gain. The current code was not designed with a multi-process architecture in mind.

[raucao]

Notifications are one of the most important features of a chat application. This is a major deficiency of ChatSecure vs. for example Conversations on Android. And because there are hardly any XMPP clients on iOS, it's basically a factor in preventing XMPP adoption on iOS. I wouldn't call that "negligible". (I would assume this opinion probably stems from you personally not using XMPP group chats for work, e.g. day job or open-source work.)

However, as you already looked into it and seem to know why it's a "massive undertaking", could you maybe give some pointers on the crux of the problem? From the outside looking in, and from only experience with other push notification systems, I would think that the code handling incoming notifications would live almost entirely outside of existing code, and that it would "only" have to look up the group chat username somehow. Maybe it's easier to contribute this, if it's known what the issue is exactly (vs. just a giant red warning saying "massive, don't touch").