If you live in India, you might be a part of one of those WhatsApp group chats that you can’t just up and leave due to peer pressure. If you make a mistake by not muting one of such groups, you will be bombarded with an endless stream of forwarded messages, or worse, a low-res GIF with a flower that says ‘Good morning’ every day. To rescue us from all these unnecessary distractions, WhatsApp has long offered a mute option but the latest update makes a much-needed change to this feature.
As spotted in July, you can now mute chats and groups forever. Previously, you had to manually mute these conversations every year, since the maximum mute limit was one year. In case you’re not interested to mute them forever, the other possible options are 8 hours and a week.
You can now mute a chat forever 🤫 pic.twitter.com/DlH7jAt6P8
— WhatsApp (@WhatsApp) October 23, 2020
To mute chats forever, all you have to do is long-press on the conversation and press the mute button present in the top-right corner. In the pop-up menu that appears, you need to pick ‘Always’ and tap the OK button. You can choose to see notifications by checking the ‘Show notifications’ option or stay aloof of whatever’s happening in a group conversation you mute.
While this might seem like a basic feature for those who are not active on WhatsApp, it is certainly a long-awaited one, especially among those who have pesky relatives or acquaintances. You can mute chats from WhatsApp’s Android app, iOS app, and even on the web.
Now that I can finally forget about those groups I never cared to check, all I’m asking is for WhatsApp to bring vacation mode – the company’s upcoming feature to make sure that archived chats don’t come back to the home page after an incoming notification. If you are interested in learning about more features missing in WhatsApp, click through to check out the list we have compiled.
