Reinstate sections from the old room list instead of filters

[orangenstein]

Your use case

What would you like to do?

We want to keep sections for favourites/low-priority/people etc not filters.

Why would you like to do it?

The new UI is much messier without these.

How would you like to achieve it?

Revert the change if necessary.

Have you considered any alternatives?

I've considered using a different client but you guys do good work and I'd like to at least give you honest feedback.

Additional context

Thanks for the work you do.

[t3chguy]

Please keep issues to 1 "request" each otherwise they may be wrongly triaged or closed as duplicate, e.g. your 2nd request is #30844

[orangenstein]

Please keep issues to 1 "request" each otherwise they may be wrongly triaged or closed as duplicate, e.g. your 2nd request is #30844

Thanks. Edited it out.

[JohnDepon]

I agree, the new room list is a downgrade.
Here's my original comments on it: #30640 (comment)

Regarding the message previews, on the old room list, the option was right there on each group.
No need to dig into settings. And you could enable it for specific groups (ie: only on favorites).
So, even there, there's a UX downgrade.

[kevincox]

These sections were a huge feature that I craved in other messaging apps. It allowed me to have different groups that were all readily accessible.

I see how they make sense on mobile due to space constraints but on desktop it was really useful to have the different groups all available.

My use case is pretty simple:

The first section is People. These tend to be lower volumes of messages yet they are the ones that I compose messages out of the blue to the most often. For example my partner is almost always visible in this list. But also people who I am talking with naturally appear in this list for a reasonable amount of time. Some people likely use favourites to have a more explicit version of this pinned to the top but for me just the People section was enough.

With the new version active rooms drown out everything else. They push people right out the bottom of the list a scroll and scroll and search away. Previously these would be a dedicated section where they can only fight each other and enabling sorting unreads to the top helped make it easy to catch up when I had time.

Lastly the low-priority was a key section for very noisy rooms that I occasionally look at. These even push regular large rooms out of the list and would be always "unread" so pinned to the top undesirably. With the new list these rooms are now multiple clicks away. I need to expand the filters, then select "Low Priority" then when I am done I need to undo the filter work. This is much more annoying then just scrolling down a bit. This is less important as it is a bit less request. But it would be nice if it was somehow less sticky to avoid needing to mess around with filters all of the time. The ability to have different sections and easy scroll away really did make this nice though.

[Sancus]

Here's some feedback on this. I think I would like the filtered view better if:

1. You could have multiple filters enabled at once(so people + rooms, or favourites + people). This seems like a basic feature for any sort of filtering. I immediately tried to ctrl-click multiple filters and was confused about why I could not.
2. A "sort by room type" option is added. Bonus points for letting us drag the categories to our preferred order, and for sub-sort options for a-z and activity.

[mistydemeo]

The big problem for me with the new room list is that the filters aren't persistent. If you enable a filter, then switch to a new space and switch back, you get sent back to the unfiltered view.

I have a very large number of chats, so I heavily relied on having a "favourited" space so that I could get a list of just the chats I check most often. That's no longer an option; if I switch away from the "home" space, then switch back, I get the unfiltered room list and lose track of those favourited chats. It's much harder for me to keep track of the chats that matter to me now.

[t3chguy]

@mistydemeo thats #30791