I have been using discourse for years, and am still a bit mystified by group messages. We do not allow members to use it because of this, but do have a helpdesk team who use it.
I just created a test user and added it to the group, and opened the group inbox for two accounts side by side by side on my screen to observe how it works. I noticed two things:
if I archive a message, it will archive it for others in the group. I had thought this was handled individually by each member.
the list of messages in the group is not the same for every member. it seems to be in a different order. I also had thought it would be the same for everyone.
Does it prioritize the messages differently for each member somehow, eg putting messages I am personally in at the top?
Yes, this is expected. We use Meta to handle our incoming team emails, and this works well for us. Anything in the inbox is still awaiting a response. Archived things are ‘handled’, but still available for other team members to view.
That is strange! Both the inbox and the archive should be ordered by the ‘activity’ column, with most recent at the top. Are you seeing something different?
Annoyingly, I am not able to replicate what I saw earlier. I am now keeping the two tabs open and am monitoring them. For now they are remaining in sync. When I archive a message in one tab, the other tab shows the “See 1 new or updated topic” blue notice at the top of the list. Selecting that brings it back in sync.
I do notice the blue “new” notice appears next to messages that I haven’t seen, specific to that member.
So this is all making more sense now. I will keep an eye on it.