[WhatsApp] Archived chats should be treated as muted

[asemarafa]

Description

I noticed that for WhatsApp, archived chats are currently both visible and unmuted in nchat. This results in
receiving desktop/sound notifications for chats that are intended to be quiet (archived).

I compared this with the project's current Telegram implementation and found that Telegram simply hides archived chat
(by filtering for chatListMain). While the Telegram implementation might need its own bug report later (as it makes cha
inaccessible within nchat), for WhatsApp, the correct and expected behavior is that archived chats are implicitly
muted.

Observed Behavior

• Archived chats are visible in the chat list.
• They are not marked as muted in the UI.
• Notifications are still triggered when a new message is received in an archived chat.

Expected Behavior

• Archived chats should be automatically marked as muted.
• Unarchiving a chat should restore its previous manual mute state (e.g., if a user-set 8-hour mute was active before
  archiving, it should remain active after unarchiving).
• New messages in archived chats should not trigger notifications.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Archive a whatsapp contact or group on your phone.
2. Receive a message in that archived chat.
3. Observe that nchat triggers a notification and the chat appears unmuted.

Additional Context

I have a PR ready that utilizes the archive information already provided by the whatsmeow library (which is current
ignored by the project).

My implementation chooses to mute rather than hide archived chats. This ensures they remain accessible within
nchat (since there is no dedicated "Archive View") while strictly adhering to the "archived chats don't notify" rule.

[d99kris]

I have converted this issue to a feature request.

As mentioned in #467 I'm not sure it's ideal to use the muted flag also for archived state.

I would prefer a user interface where archived chats are not visible in the main chat list, but perhaps listed in the Go to Chat (ctrl-n) dialog, perhaps last in the list with some prefix [Archived]. Alternatively we could introduce a new dedicated "unarchive dialog", but I'm less inclined to this option.

Extending this, we could support some keybinding (alt-a) for users to archive chats from nchat. And selecting an archived chat in the above dialog would cause it to become unarchived.

I feel this would be closer to the official mobile apps behavior.

[asemarafa]

i agree archived chats should have its own handling but that is a bigger undertaking i am not up for yet. my PR addresses a ux issue for whatsapp users who have many archived chats which are treated as muted by official clients and get surprised when nchat notifies them. The PR was meant as a stopgap solution until a permanent solution for archived chats is decided for both whatsapp and telegram

[mycroft89]

Any of the proposed solutions would work great! Whatever it takes to stop having archived chats getting to the top of my list please...

[d99kris]

I am still reluctant to merge the PR as-is, for a couple of reasons:

1. Once proper "archived chats" support is added, there would be users with cached chat info indicating their chat is muted, when in-fact it is archived. It will be complex to fix-up such wrong cached data.
2. Some users will see their nchat UI indicating a chat is muted, while they had archived - not muted - it, and there will likely be bug reports on this. Or at least user confusions.

I think we don't necessarily need to fix all the stuff I suggested in my previous comment, but I think at the minimum we would need a new isArchived flag in ChatInfo (and its cache table), and properly setting this flag on telegram / whatsapp / signal first setup/sync and subsequent phone device changes (i.e. using phone app to archive / unarchive a chat). I have some ideas on how to implement it and I was planning to find some time this weekend or next to do it.

[d99kris]

Hi again @asemarafa - support for not showing archived chats has been added in v5.14.14 / 05d1634.
And support for archiving / unarchiving chats from nchat has been added in v5.14.17 / f44ef4c.