A hidden WhatsApp shortcut lets you mark all pending messages from groups you’re a member of as read.
If you’re in a lot of WhatsApp groups or communities , chances are you can’t keep up with reading all the new messages. Groups pile up unread messages while chats with your friends get buried in the background. There’s a solution.
If you prefer to keep your messages to zero, you don’t need to go through the manual task of going into all the groups one by one to have them marked as read. Instead, WhatsApp has a hidden menu to mark all your groups as read in a couple of seconds .
Read all your groups in two seconds
There are those who prefer to leave pending messages at zero and who don’t mind having dozens of chats with pending messages. If you are in the first case, you will be interested to know that WhatsApp has a menu to mark all pending messages from your groups as read , without altering personal chats with your contacts.
This is possible thanks to the conversation filters that recently arrived in the application. With them, you can filter conversations to see only those with unread messages, those from your favorite contacts or those from groups.
The cool thing about these filters is that they hide a secret menu if you long-tap on them when they are active (i.e. they are green). This secret menu contains a single item, Mark as Read, except in the favorites tab, which has an additional menu for editing favorites.
So, if you have a lot of pending messages in groups and you don’t feel like reading them, you can do the following to automatically mark all your groups as read:
- On the Chats tab , swipe down to reveal WhatsApp filters at the top.
- Tap on Groups.
- Long press on Groups.
- Tap Mark as Read.
It’ much quicker than going into each group one by one to mark them as read, or selecting all groups and then using the mark as read option in the context menu. WhatsApp doesn’t yet have a filter for personal chats (other than groups), but you might want to pin conversations from the people you chat with the most , or mark certain contacts as favorites, so you can see those chats in the Favorites filter without them getting buried in groups.