Viewing older chats had become a nightmare

Recently, it had become way tougher to find specific older chats using the iOS app of ChatGPT. I have had this problem in the past as well, but it just got a lot worse recently. I use ChatGPT to store my thoughts from the brain (with chats of the same topic being numbered) and I really don’t want to have them disappear.

I will repeatedly be referring to these two screenshots, labeled A (with no search active) and B (with a search active).

There were 3 problems that I ran into:

1. ChatGPT refuses to load in older chats

This was a problem I had had for a few years, but it only got worse recently. In the newest update of the ChatGPT iOS app, the left-side panel only shows the most recent 18 chats. For example, in screenshot A, no chats older than disco vibes 532 :man_dancing: will show up, even if I try to load them by scrolling down.

This means I will have to search for them. This is already a bit of a hassle, but it was tolerable before. But now…

1. Names of chats are no longer factored into chat searches, making it very difficult to search

In the last few days, I have noticed that if a chat has already been loaded, searching for a term used in the name of a chat will no longer load that chat. This wasn’t how it used to work — in older versions of the app, searching for the name of a chat will always pull it up.

In screenshot B, I searched for “inner spheres”. Yet the only chats that show up are inner spheres 312–315 (which are already loaded by being in the 18 most recent chats), as well as a few older chats that have the words “inner spheres” as part of the chat content (not chat name) in at least one branch of the chat (even when it is not the primary one).

As you can tell, a lot of chats are missing — the search jumps from inner spheres 308 to inner spheres 270, skipping everything in between. Even if I were to search the words “inner spheres 285”, the chat inner spheres 285 would still not show up (it did in previous versions of the app).

This makes searching for chats way tougher, as I now have to somehow remember an exact phrase a chat contains just to search it. And even if I could, that phrase has to be specific enough to not let the chat get buried under more recent chats in the search (so it has to be something a bit longer like “marble rolls gracefully”, not just a single word like “marble”)

1. Sometimes merely loading a chat is enough to have it jump to the top, messing up order

You might have noticed that some chats were numbered twice. For example, there is inner spheres 312 (inner spheres 87). This is because one time, when I loaded up inner spheres 87, without even making any changes (like adding, editing, or regenerating messages), the chat randomly decided to pop up to the top of my chat list, above inner spheres 311.

This isn’t supposed to happen — and it not only causes it to be out of chronological order, but also makes it look like the chat happened at the wrong point in time. It only started happing in the last few weeks — prior to that, just viewing a chat hadn’t caused the chat to jump to the top at all.