I just want to vent. I hate the "Load Older Messages" button with a burning passion. Tonight, I wanted to find part of an old conversation where I talked to another author about something. I have several conversations with them, going back several years. I just spent the last twenty goddam minutes hitting the "Load Older Messages" button over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. You know how annoying what I just wrote was to read? Yeah? Well it was even more annoying to have to actually do. Now repeat three times for 3 different conversations. This is not the first time, but definitely the worst time.
Having about 1780 messages in a single conversation is quite a lot... I wished there was a shortcut to load all conversations at once. To get to the first one, I have to click even 5 times more often than you had to The only thing to make it a little easier is to press and hold Space and then click the button at the right moment. (For more messages, it might be Shift+Space instead.)
While this is annoying, I feel there is a limit to how functional one can expect the CHYOA messaging feature to be. There is a reason services like Discord and Messenger are popular as standalone applications - they are very good for messaging. For example, it would be nice if CHYOA messages could be searched with various keywords and criteria, if different topics of conversation could be separated into different message threads, if images and other files could be attached, if there was a formal reply system, if users could be added and removed (or willingly leave) at will, if the maximum group size was arbitrarily large, and if message groups could have an invite link that anyone could click to join... but then you'd just be reverse-engineering Slack/Discord. CHYOA messaging is in need of improvement, but if I'm back-and-forthing with someone that much, I would switch to a more appropriate medium.
