Leaving a WhatsApp group is one of the most violent situations that can occur in our digital lives. It is the equivalent of walking out in the middle of a neighborhood meeting with a silly or weak excuse. If we are skillful with words, we can achieve our goal in a more or less fortunate way. But let’s face it, we are not literary experts like Pérez-Reverte nor do we have time to come up with cheap excuses. And it gets worse when we are part of hundreds of groups. WhatsApp doesn’t allow us to leave the groups without notifying everyone else.
Sorry, no way, but there is a little trick that allows you to do something similar for your convenience.
The first step is to disable group notifications. To do so, enter the group profile, click the three-dot button in the top bar, and select «Mute.» Click «Mute» and select «Always» as the desired period. With this action, you will no longer receive notifications every time someone writes in that group chat.
Doing this, we will stop receiving continuous notifications and messages from that conversation, but it will remain in our conversation list as a reminder of the nightmare we just silenced. To get rid of such a bleak view and lose sight of the group forever, WhatsApp offers us the option of archiving.
To archive the group, follow the steps above, i.e. go into the group profile, click on the options button and select «Archive chat». This option will send all the archived conversations to a hidden tab, so unless you deliberately go into the archived conversations, you won’t know anything about what is written in that group. Talk about peace of mind!
Eliminating the source of the problem
The seed of all these headaches is that people really like to create groups and add you to them without your permission. Whether it’s the group of old classmates, or the group for someone’s surprise party, or the conversation with the in-law’s club… it’s hell.
Let’s solve this intrusion into our digital peace once and for all.
To avoid being added to groups without our prior permission, let’s follow these steps. Open the WhatsApp settings menu, go to the «Privacy» section and now head to «Groups». Here we select who can add us to a group. We have three options: «everyone», «my contacts» and «my contacts except». This last option allows us to create a blacklist to avoid the annoying people.
Still, if you have blocked someone from adding you to a group, you will receive a notification asking for permission to add you to the group.
Recap
Muting and archiving are not the perfect solutions, but they come very close. With this little trick, we will get rid of those nasty conversations that add nothing, and avoid leaving the group slamming the door. But as always, the best solution is prevention, if we block those users who are prone to create groups, we will get rid of a lot of headaches.
