why have Sent, delivered, read and unread flags for messages not been done yet?

[Christian Paredes]

This is a core functionality available for almost all other notification systems. Slack, Skype, MSN have those functionalities. It is imperative to have them, otherwise you miss messages! It is not modern to need to go to each single chat room to see if someone entered a post, specially when the data is available on your backend. 

When do you plan to release this feature?   We really don't understand why this has not been implemented years ago. 

We do like Hipchat, but my users at my company are unsatisfied because of this. We are planing to switch to Slack as of January 2017. 

[crivers]

Unread tracking is actually something we're working on building out, but isn't quite ready for release. The same is true for real-time delivery confirmation. If you contact us at support@hipchat.com we can put you on the list of potential beta users while we work on getting the feature out to all users. Sorry for taking so long on this one - we know how important and useful it is and we're trying to get it out to everyone as quickly as possible!

[Neil Bull]

How far away are we with this?

[jayb]

Read/Unread tracking was released in clients last week. If you are using a 4.x client desktop client, an up-to-date mobile client, or the web client then you should be seeing unread message counters when you start your application.

As for sent/delivered indicators, the applications assume a message was sent and delivered. If it fails to send the message is marked to indicate the failure.

Delivery is a more complicated thing because users can (and often do) have more than one device. Is a message considered delivered if one device gets the message or if all devices get the message? A mobile phone that has no service can't receive a message so what does that mean for messages?

HipChat takes the stance that, if a message is considered "sent" then users will receive the broadcast message in real-time (if they are online) or they will see the message in the chat history when they return.