element-web
element-web copied to clipboard
element-hq
It's awkward that rooms say that guests can join when they are invite only
Setting rooms to invite only or creating a new room end up saying 'X has made the room invite only' then 'X has allowed guests to join' - this causes confusion for people, as it implies that the room is not truly invite only despite that being completely false (the room is invite only)
Copying from https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/10685#issuecomment-525921742 :
Related https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/8522 https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/5317 https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/10685
Maybe change the text to say "X has allowed invited guests to join" if the room is invite-only?
"X has allowed invited guests to join" => This is of course more correct but I still think it's weird and should be removed completely. If the message already says: "X has made the room invite only" that gives IMHO already enough information. What is it here that X allowed? "Invited guest to join"? Yeah, that's why you invite people to sth. in the first place. If I invite people to my birthday party, then, yes, technically I also need to allow them to enter my home. True. But who would send out birthday cards saying: "Dear Jack, I invite you to my birthday party and with this card I also grant you the special permission to enter my home when you are knocking at mydoor". Wow, how generous ;-) Awkward indeed if you ask me!
@rgpublic Guests are a special type of matrix account with a numeric username and no password, they are very temporal and do not get access to things like VoIP.
@t3chguy. Okay, I see. Thanks for the explanation. But still I think this is all just terrible usability. Is there already an issue that wants to remove/rename the Guest stuff altogether? Otherwise I think I'll just file one and see what happens. No normal user knows what Guests are. How you can create or use them etc. Nevertheless the UI is cluttered with options and messages that mention them that are confusing and seemingly even contraditory. :-(
Fully agree with @rgpublic in terms of poor usability and user-friendliness, especially for new users of Riot. This should be fixed asap.
I also agree with @rgpublic Nobody knows what guests really are. It's too confusing to see it mentioned so often in the UI.
Please remove the message "guests can join" in the community view room list, as well. I have a room that is invite only, and it displays "guests can join" there as well.
Can a room be made "restricted to current participants" which is not even invite-only? If the admin wanted to invite somebody, they could "unlock" the room to be invite-only, invite the user, then lock/restrict it again, so they could avoid the "allowed guests to join" terminology. I don't know if the protocol allows such use case but it could be another approach.
I also agree with @rgpublic Please remove the message "guests can join" in the community view room list, as well. I have a room that is invite only, and it displays "guests can join" there as well.
We also see this in the Community view and it is confusing even for people who know what that means because this is such a niche/rarely surfaced feature of the Matrix protocol.
Flagging as needing design to figure out wording/UI for this area. Generally I think this whole area needs a UI refresh.
edit: oops, it's already flagged as needing design.