Rooms list doesn't show grandchild rooms as being in a space if you are not a member of their immediate parent subspace

[williamkray]

Description

Joining a new community (#community:matrix.org) which has many rooms I am already a member of, most of those rooms did not render properly in the Spaces panel. Exploring rooms shows that I am indeed in the room by showing me a "View" button instead of "Join". However, clicking "View" takes me back to the Home (All Spaces) space to show me the room.

Logs being sent: yes

Version information

• Platform: web

For the web app:

• Browser: Firefox
• OS: Arch Linux
• URL: develop.element.io

[SimonBrandner]

Can repro on desktop. It doesn't get fixed after a restart

[SimonBrandner]

Clearing cache doesn't seem to fix this either

[SimonBrandner]

Ok, I don't think I can repro this with other spaces... Can someone please confirm this? Could the space be broken?

[t3chguy]

So the issue above is because that room is in a subspace and you haven't joined the subspace.
This is a known limitation until we have the /peek API to watch those not-yet-joined subspaces.

[williamkray]

that... makes complete sense. i didn't put that together despite having already experienced that with the testing space.

[toger5]

@t3chguy This makes sense.
When peek is available, will that be the default behavior? showing grandchild?
Or is would that be optional?
Imo showing it be default is what I would have expected.

[t3chguy]

Product/Design hasn't investigated this yet to my knowledge so no idea.

[clokep]

So the issue above is because that room is in a subspace and you haven't joined the subspace.
This is a known limitation until we have the /peek API to watch those not-yet-joined subspaces.

I think that was a potential solution, but I think the root cause was that the spaces summary previously did not recurse into rooms which had join rules of public (matrix-org/synapse#10298) as well as some other bugs if you had a pending invite to a space, etc.

I think this should be fixed as of Synapse 1.39.0.

Note that the current spaces summary for #community:matrix.org still might not be 100% accurate until pagination is complete. Server-side support for this was done (and is in Synapse 1.41.0), but Element Web needs an update for it still.

[novocaine]

@williamkray can you check if things have improved for you please?

[williamkray]

yes, i'm seeing lots more rooms in the subspaces!

[clokep]

Looking at this again, is this referring to the main "Explore spaces" view, or did you mean where rooms are shown on the left-sidebar? The Synapse PRs I pointed to are specifically for the explore spaces view, I'm unsure about how Element Web handles the left-sidebar.

[williamkray]

@clokep you are correct, i lost track of why i originally opened this ticket in the first place. thank you for reminding me.

i have left the "bots" subspace of the matrix community, and the left panel still does not show me those rooms when i have selected the matrix community space. instead, those rooms are only visible when i visit the "home" metaspace.

i would expect that because these rooms are grandchildren of the matrix community space, they would still show up under that space, regardless of whether i am a member of their requisite sub-space.

[clokep]

Thanks! I've reopened this then (and tried to clarify the title a bit).

[novocaine]

This is an annoying limitation, but downgrading severity to S-minor as this doesn't severely degrade major functionality and the workaround is to access the rooms via Home

[novocaine]

@kittykat convinced me that this is S-Major as she's mysteriously lost track of rooms without understanding why; so most users wouldn't even know they were missing out

[novocaine]

Possible workaround - auto-join parent sub-spaces on joining a room.

[afranke]

FWIW I don’t join subspaces on purpose. Spaces replace communities, and so I associate them with the same semantics. Just because I join a room that is part of a (sub)space/community doesn’t mean I feel like I am part of that space/community. Or to put it differently, I wouldn’t necessarily want to seen as a member of that group. The workaround of joining subspaces (automatically or not) doesn’t really solve the issue for me.

[novocaine]

Well .. it does solve the issue, right? You just don't want to be auto-joined to a subspace, which is fair enough.

[dbkr]

Another aspect of this is that sometimes the grandchild space just appears in your space panel for no reason I can see. Needless to say, having other spaces just show up in your space bar is somewhat disconcerting.