[Question] Should poll votes bump a room to the top of the ordered room list?

[wrjlewis]

Steps to reproduce

1. Have a room with active polls
2. People respond to polls
3. Room sits at the top of the room list

This could be a feature though I'd argue it's more of a bug as:

• The timestamps in the room list become out of order, if one of those rooms has polls. Like in this example where the room 'WhatsApple FC' has polls ongoing. The latest message is at 10:09 yet in the room list it appears in between two rooms at 10:32 and 10:37, because a vote was cast between those timestamps.
  

• The room preview for a room with polls active doesn't acknowledge the latest event was a poll vote, ie it doesn't show 'A vote was cast' or similar. It's confusing to see a room jump to the top of the list, yet the message preview stays the same, not informing you why the room jumped.

So we're in a situation where the room ordering does acknowledge poll votes, but the room list preview and the timestamps on the room list do not. Creating a strange experience when put together.

• In other chat apps, like WhatsApp, votes do not bump the room in the room list. Perhaps users are therefore used to that same behaviour

(I'm sure not the most important issue right now, just wanted to capture some thoughts while I had them!)

Outcome

What did you expect?

The room with votes to stay in it's position in the room list order, despite votes being cast. Unless an actual new message is sent.

What happened instead?

The room lives at the top of the room list, in my case accentuated by the room having 50 people with active polls.

Your phone model

No response

Operating system version

No response

Application version

663

Homeserver

Synapse 1.112

Will you send logs?

No

[pixlwave]

This is a known limitation we have right now: It should behave correctly in unencrypted rooms, but as the bump types include m.room.encrypted events and poll votes are encrypted, this is the behaviour we see in encrypted rooms.

It's possible that with a combination of local sorting and (soon) SSS, we might be able to work around this, but gappy syncs make it a lot harder.