Most people archive their WhatsApp chats to declutter their main feed, or possibly to ignore certain group chats. It’s not personal, it’s just for feng shui. That kind of comes undone whenever an archived chat gets a new message and it pops up on your main screen again. Well, WhatsApp’s fixing that issue, by rolling out a new settings update that will keep your archived chats buried for good.

What goes in the WhatsApp archive stays in the archive

Previously the archive feature was certainly useful for temporarily cleaning up your main chat tab, but was completely useless whenever a new message was added to an archived chat, which would bring it back to the front page again. Now the only intrusion you’ll get is through a number to the right of the ‘Archived’ tab that sits at the top of your screen, which indicates how many unread messages you have sitting in your archives.

If you want your archived chats back on the main screen again, you’ll have to manually bring them back over.

For some, having the archive tab right at the top of your screen may be just as annoying, but personally we’ll take it if it means our archived chats don’t come back to haunt us. However, if you’d like to change this you can head over to your settings to do so.

Just go into your Archived tab, then tap the three dot menu icon. Hit ‘Archive settings’. From there you can turn off the ‘Keep chats archived’ setting and you’ll be back to the way you were before, sending the archive bar back from whence it came. This will let archived chats return to clutter your inbox again, but that’s your trade-off to make.

WhatsApp’s been working on quite a few updates of late, the most recent of which being a way to transfer your chats from an Android device to an Apple one.