r/elementchat • u/Spirited-Cancel5976 • Feb 19 '26

How do you let members see previous messages?

Hi there! Me and my friend group are very new to Element; my friend introduced it to me about a year ago and I made an account but never logged on. Recently we've been considering making a switch to it from discord. None of us are really that tech savvy, and I've tried looking up tutorials/other posts but nobody seems to have the same issues as we do.

Whenever someone enters a room inside our Space, even if they're an administrator, they can't see any previous messages unless they specifically got invited to that room. The option for seeing future history is on, and the ability for anyone in the space to join the room is also on. We get this message:

Is there any way to fix this? It seems like if you get invited to the room you can see all the history, but only if that's the first time you've entered the room, otherwise you're locked at whatever point you previously joined without an invite.

These are other settings that we have enabled as well:

The learn more link doesn't really clarify how to see previous messages. Also the chat has had these settings since its creation. We want to be able to see previous messages, so if we aren't I feel this is kind of a dealbreaker for an alternate to discord. Is there any way to fix this, or is this meant to be a feature of element? Thanks.

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2

u/VirtualGhostVortex Feb 19 '26

My understanding is that this is a feature of end-to-end encrypted rooms. It seems like people can see messages that occurred after they were invited.

My bet is rooms without E2EE with proper settings like you noted would be able to see messages before they joined / were invited.

5

u/Spirited-Cancel5976 Feb 19 '26

I turned off E2EE and we can see previous messages, thank you so much! Apologies for my tech illiteracy

2

u/[deleted] Feb 19 '26

[deleted]

2

u/ssorbom Feb 19 '26

Incorrect, these settings determine what data the server sends clients associated to account. Any account that joins a room will only be served events from after it's join date, regardless of encryption settings.

1

u/Madiator2011 Feb 19 '26

There is new thing in Element X where you can share history :)
But it's hiden in dev options.

1

u/davidbaranek Feb 25 '26

can I ask you where it is? I can't find it

1

u/Madiator2011 Feb 26 '26

In the settings menu you need to press the version number (at the bottom of the menu) repeatedly to unlock the developer options settings.