I’ve been using Kontalk for a long time and tried 4.0 beta (because I needed group chats) with my family until it went public.
I also have been using Replicant for a long time and this weekend updated my phone from Replicant 4.2 to 6.0. Because I had the phone encrypted I found problems updating and I had to perform a full factory reset. As I exported and backed up my Kontalk personal key some time ago I had no problem reinstalling and keep chatting with my family and friends.
My problem came when I had no conversations stored in my phone (don’t know how to backup/restore them), specially the group I’m administrator for.
Tried recreating the group with the same name, but some people could not see others. Another problem my sister told me was that she had two groups with the same name. Because of that I removed everyone from the new group (and finally me) and deleted group conversations, but I don’t know if the new group (with zero users) has been deleted.
Is there any way I can look up for the old group and reconnect it and keep using/administrating it?
I guess I can create a new group with the same users but a different name and ask users to leave the old group, that would remain with me as the only user. What happens with groups with one users and/or no activity?
What would be the next steps recommended to regroup with my family in Kontalk?
Thanks in advance and congratulations for the great work!!
Hello Xnake,
groups in Kontalk are handled directly by clients, server assistance is needed only for message routing, nothing more. As a matter of fact, servers are unaware of group existance. This means that when all members leave a group, the group doesn’t exist anymore.
Currently, since there is no recovery of messages yet, the only way of reentering a group is to ask the group owner to add you again (Group information screen > Long press on your user > “Add again” action in the upper-right part of the screen). However… this feature has a bug that has been fixed a few days after releasing 4.0.3 (4.0.4 will be released very soon), so it really doesn’t work well, sorry. Until 4.0.4 is out, you’ll have to create a new group from scratch.
I guess I can create a new group with the same users but a different name and ask users to leave the old group, that would remain with me as the only user. What happens with groups with one users and/or no activity?
As I said, the group is actually an abstraction, not really a real entity. As soon as all members leaves, it will disappear.
I know it’s not the best approach right now; once message backup/restore will be implement this will become much easier.
Sadly, I’m the only administrator of the group (I know Kontalk 4 doesn’t allow more than one administrator) because I’m more advanced in computing stuff and I’ve been using and advocating for free software (and Kontalk in this case) for a long time.
I’ll create a new group and will ask other members to leave the old one. Maybe they’ll keep the old group for themselves
Thank you very much for your answer and all your fantastic work.
