All those who cringe at being part of annoying WhatsApp groups, now even muting them may not mean you can escape them completely. The world’s most popular instant messaging application has a new feature that allows users to tag others in group chats and even if you’ve muted the conversation, you will get a notification.
So what does this feature do?
The new feature allows users to bring in someone into a group chat by simply typing the “@” symbol and selecting the person’s name from the pop-up list. Just like Facebook.
And just like Facebook when you’re mentioned, you’ll get a notification.
In this case though, you can tag anyone who’s in your contact list or anyone who’s in the group chat but isn’t on your contact list. Even the ‘mute group’ option will not be a deterrence as users will still get notifications if they are tagged.
While it allows for productive chats also so that you could only be roped into a group chat when you’re mentioned, it could also mean people send things directed at you and you can’t avoid the notification.
And it gets worse. WhatsApp has also increased the group limit so that you can now add up to 256 members in a group chat at the same time. It was restricted to 100 earlier. So while you could have your entire office team on one group chat, it also means you could have your entire extended family in another.
The only escape? You exit the group or disable notifications from Whatsapp entirely.
This feature is already available on both Android and iOS platforms, but is not there on the desktop version.
