WhatsApp Provides New Archive Options to Permanently Hide Noisy Group Chats

WhatsApp has added a new option to manage your group chat threads, with archived chats now remaining archived and hidden, even when new messages are sent into the group.

To be clear, users have always been able to archive their WhatsApp chats, but now, you won’t get notifications about new messages to those chats that you’ve archived, essentially enabling you to hide them from view. You can check them out in your archive and re-activate them whenever you wish.

As summarized by WhatsApp chief Will Cathcart:

“Have a WhatsApp group that’s a little noisy and cluttering up your inbox? With the new Archive, you can now keep an active thread out of your inbox, but still have access to it whenever you want!”

WhatsApp has been experimenting with its archive options over the past couple of years, with this feature actually being tested as ‘vacation mode’ back in 2019. Many users have expressed frustration that their archived chats keep returning to their inbox whenever a new message is received – and now, that will no longer be the case.

Which just means that you need to be extra sure that you want to archive a chat, because you’ll miss out on any new messages from then on. Or you’ll need to be vigilant about checking in on your archived discussions, if there could be details that you want to stay up with. 

It’s a relatively minor update, but it’ll be big for heavy WhatsApp users.

The new archive update is being rolled out from today.