Show old versions of a room in a space even if that space has been updated with the new room

[babolivier]

Your use case

What would you like to do?

Let's consider room 1 in a space. Room 1 is upgraded to room 2, and the space is updated with room 2 as a child instead of room 1. As a member of room 1 who hasn't joined room 2 yet, I would expect Element to show room 1 in the space, but it currently moves it to the "Home" section (since room 1 is not strictly speaking part of the space anymore).

Why would you like to do it?

I find it super confusing to have a room suddenly disappear from a space because the admin upgraded it. On top of that, room 1 might be referenced by other spaces which haven't been updated yet, so the room might move to somewhere other than "Home", which means the user may need to look through all of their spaces to find it.

How would you like to achieve it?

Element could look at a tombstone event in room 1 when the space is updated, and if that event points to a room that's in the space it could show the room as in that space.

Have you considered any alternatives?

I can't find any other than having the user look manually through Home and all of their spaces for the missing rooms.

Additional context

No response

[SimonBrandner]

I partially believe this should be left in the hands of the space admins

[t3chguy]

This starts to break down, what if you're in many rooms with Tombstones pointing at RoomX, RoomX has now bifurcated into many rooms in your room list and look very strange when you're comparing the hierarchy calculated by the server and your room list in the left panel.

Right now EW does respect tombstones, but only when seeing a matching m.room.create backref, which means it needs to have the room locally

[nadonomy]

Triaging as major as users may fail to trace their rooms, and a room falling out of its space can easily erode trust.