The UX doesn't make it clear that room history changes only affect events written _after_ the settings change was made.

[alexgleason]

I invited someone to a room. The room history was set to "members only (since they were invited)." It didn't work. The person joined the room and was able to scroll up and see the history.

This was incredibly awkward and extremely bad! Please fix this!

[turt2live]

I can confirm this.

My view:

@temp:t2l.io's view

[lukebarnard1]

Ok, so @erikjohnston has explained that you can only change the history visibility for messages sent after the history visibility change. Riot needs to spell this out much more clearly I think.

[lampholder]

I post this only to highlight how insufficient a pop up is for communicating this very important message, since I think what we have here is (yet more) evidence that popups are essentially "invisible".

Anyway, when you make this change Riot pops up a warning explaining exactly what's going to happen:

[turt2live]

To be honest, I didn't even read the dialog in my testing. I just assumed it wasn't a problem, and was surprised when the bug could be reproduced.

Some nice bold/red text explaining it would probably catch the eye enough to reconsider skimming the dialog.

[marykatefain]

I don't think that popup exists at all on mobile. I just tested it myself because I swear I never saw that before... I use riot almost exclusively on mobile.

[alexgleason]

I changed the history visibility on Android which did not display this popup message.

For what it's worth, I've seen the message on desktop and even then misunderstood what it meant.

[lampholder]

Yeah - popups are awful, esp at conveying important information like this.

So let's leave this bug scoped to doing something better in Riot web - I'll make another bug for android.

[lampholder]

element-hq/riot-android#1703

[ara4n]

The root cause of this is https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/issues/533

[hex-m]

To be honest, I didn't even read the dialog in my testing. I just assumed it wasn't a problem, and was surprised when the bug could be reproduced.

Some nice bold/red text explaining it would probably catch the eye enough to reconsider skimming the dialog.

In the latest version (Element 1.7.7 on Desktop) there isn't even a pop-up anymore. This is a serious privacy/security issue!

Making the explanation (or the word future) red/bold would be a good first step.

An even better solution would be to change the invite workflow and show a preview of what an invited user would see when they join.