Improve DM room naming

[MightyCreak]

Is your suggestion related to a problem? Please describe.
The problem comes from the default names of DM rooms with more than 3 persons. The default behavior seems to be: " and N others".

This becomes problematic when you start to have several rooms of the sort. For instance, me and my girlfriend have several rooms like that, because we like to share discussion rooms with each of our friends. In the end, we get several "John and 3 others" named rooms.

Describe the solution you'd like
From what I've seen in Slack, the DM name was a simple list of the room members (except yourself). So you would get "Sylvie, Marie, John", which could be ellipsed by the UI, thus giving something like "Sylvie, Marie, ...".

The good thing with this solution is that you can easily differentiate your DMs.

Instead of having:

• "Sylvie and 3 others"
• "Sylvie and 3 others"
• "Sylvie and 3 others"

You get:

• "Sylvie, Marie, ..."
• "Sylvie, David, ..."
• "Sylvie, Cassandra, ..."

Which is already a lot better.

Describe alternatives you've considered
An alternative is to name the rooms yourself, but it has 2 disadvantages:

• you need to add your own name in the list, otherwise the others wouldn't know you're in
• in the future, it is probable the DM room would not allow to change their name (per MSC vector-im/element-web#2199)

[t3chguy]

This naming comes from the Matrix spec, I suggest you open an issue in https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/issues

See https://matrix.org/docs/spec/client_server/r0.6.1#calculating-the-display-name-for-a-room

[turt2live]

tbh if a spec issue gets opened then it'll get bounced back here - the spec is a recommendation, not a requirement, for this area.

[turt2live]

it's also not consistent: the spec recommends using at least 5 members before shortening to an and N others...

[MightyCreak]

@t3chguy, it seems to me like the spec is merely a suggestion for the UI/UX of the client, especially when the spec says this:

Clients SHOULD use minimum 5 heroes to calculate room names where possible, but may use more or less to fit better with their user experience.

Thus I think this issue is pretty relevant since it's something Element can fix on their side. The spec is pretty clear that the clients have the last word on that matter, and ironically, Element already doesn't respect what the spec says (as @turt2live pointed out).

IMO this issue is a good suggestion for Element. As a user I don't really care about the specs. It would have happened on Fractal, I would have opened an issue on their issue tracker.

Please consider reopening this issue.

[MightyCreak]

@t3chguy sorry to insist, but I really think this issue has more to do with Element UI/UX than spec recommendations. thx 😉

[t3chguy]

I thought I reopened this, my bad!

[tlaundal]

We have initiated some discussion related to the naive way of solving this in matrix-org/matrix-js-sdk#1602.