element-hq / element-hq/element-web

We have no UI indication when the app is stuck syncing and showing stale room history.

Open
#19,374 1 comment 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub
A-Sliding-Sync A-Timeline O-Occasional S-Minor T-Defect
Dominant language
TypeScript
Stars
13.5k
Forks
2.8k
PR merge metrics
PR metrics pending

Description

### Steps to reproduce

1. Where are you starting? What can you see?

I launched app.element.io for the first time since August

### Outcome

#### What did you expect?

I expected to see a spinner at the bottom of the timeline to let me know that EW is blocked doing a massive gappy sync, and that the history it's showing me is stale.

#### What happened instead?

I have no way to tell that the history is stale; it looks like i'm viewing a normal instance of the room, and i have no way to tell that the client is trying to sync.

A good enough solution would perhaps be to:
1. Show a spinner at the bottom of timelines the first time you call /sync after launching the app
2. If /sync takes significantly more than 30s to return, show a spinner at the bottom of timelines, or some other UX idiom to show that in practice the client is currently failing to sync from the server.

### Operating system

macOS

### Browser information

Chrome

### URL for webapp

app.element.io

### Homeserver

matrix.org

### Will you send logs?

No

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

Reproduce the stale-history state in app.element.io after a long gap, using the issue's macOS, Chrome, and matrix.org context. Trace the first /sync after launch and the timeline UI; done means users can distinguish an in-progress or stalled sync from normal room history, with the chosen indication covered by an appropriate test.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
typescript
Domain
distributed-systems, frontend
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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