Here It Is, the Worst Slack Bug

So, here’s a nightmare scenario: You open your work Slack on your phone so you can DM with a few colleagues. You regularly talk to this group, but you do not see the chat in the list of active DMS on your phone, so you select all participants individually to pick back the conversation. Without thinking too much of it, you receive an odd prompt that asks, “Do you want to include the entire chat history?”

Because yes, you think, of course it should include the chat history of group DMs you’ve been chatting with for ages. Who has time for that? There is business to manage! Necessary information to inform! But the answer here is no, you don’t want to do that. Because if you do, you’ve ported Your entire DM history with the first person you choose to chat with in a DM group.

This is not speculative. In fact, this screw-up happened to me when I tried to DM two of my bosses, Brian Barrett and Tim Marchman. Suddenly, Tim had full access to years of private conversations between me and Brian, with no obvious way to undo it. “Lamao Andrew,” Brian wrote, “what have you done.”

dead I passed out in embarrassment at this point – and worried that I’d just made a catastrophic mistake. I can’t even explain what happened, let alone this.

Once I realized I wasn’t going to lead to HR and my heart rate returned to normal, I was determined to figure out what went wrong and warn the world not to make the same mistake I did.

As it turns out, this is definitely not a Slack feature – it’s a bug.

“This sounds like a mobile application sync issue,” Slack spokesman Vince Bitong said via email. “Sometimes when switching between desktop and mobile Slack, recent conversations (including group DMs) don’t immediately appear in your mobile DMs list until the app syncs.”

Because my group DM with Brian and Tim didn’t show up in my conversation list, Bitong added, “the app treated it as creating a new group conversation. That’s why you got the chat history prompt—it was asking if you were the first colleague in this new group to share your personal Whether to include chat history.”

My next question was, of course, how Slack users can make sure this never happens – and what to do if it does. “You can go about it in a couple of ways,” Bitong says. “Manually pull to refresh the app first. If that doesn’t work, close the app completely and reopen ”” This should bring your DM list up to date, which fixes the issue.

Also, as mentioned, if you see the “Do you want to include the entire chat history?” If you are prompted for a Group DM that already exists, be sure to click “No”. (And even for a new group DM, think very carefully about what might be hidden in that history before you share.)