The groups on Whatsapp and the so-called " broadcast " are a great convenience, they allow you to chat with friends to organize dinners or meetings or to stay in touch and talk to others. The group chat can also be a great distraction: if there are many participants, in fact, you will be able to receive numerous messages throughout the day, of which you do not always want to be notified by sound or on sight.
Luckily, in the settings of the Whatsapp applications for Android, iPhone and Windows Phone, you can configure the notification options for groups, in a different way than you can do for one-on-one chat.
To begin with, Whatsapp group chat has very specific characteristics and are of two types: group or broadcast .
By tapping the button at the top right, anyone can start a group or a new broadcast on the Chat screen.
The difference between the two types is that with broadcast it is possible to send the same message with Whatsapp to several people together, ideal, for example, to make Christmas greetings.
The recipients of the broadcast receive a message from us without seeing the other recipients, as if it were sent only to them and their replies will be visible to us.
It is possible to use broadcasts to always send a certain message to the same group of people (note that replies do not appear in the broadcast)
To add more contacts to the broadcast, open it (it has the megaphone icon) and tap on the title.
If you want to make it more recognizable in the list, you can change the broadcast title in a personalized way (but not the icon).
Broadcasts can only be sent to recipients who have our number saved in their address book.
Groups, on the other hand, are conversations where all participants can speak and read what others write.
The group must be given a title and invite participants by touching the + or writing the name.
A maximum of 256 people can participate in a group and, at the same time, a maximum of 50 groups can be created.
The group is managed by those who create it who become its administrator and only he can invite other people to chat or eliminate those who are already present.
To remove group participants, you must touch the title and then hold on the name of a participant until the menu appears to remove it.
From the same group information screen, you can press the key to exit.
You can also simply touch and hold on the conversation name from the chat screen to leave the group.
From the same menu it is possible, on Android, to put a group " shortcut " icon on the home screen.
If the manager of the group decides to leave, a random person of the participants becomes the owner (and therefore will have to invite the old administrator again, if he wishes to return).
In a group, anyone can change the icon and title.
To do this, just go to the group information and touch the pencil next to the title or the icon at the top left to set or edit them.
After a 2016 update it is also possible to tag people on Whatsapp in groups to send them notification.
If you do not want to leave a group but do not want to receive sound notifications of each message sent by others, from the conversation window you have to press the options button (top right or fixed key in the bottom left depending on the smartphone Android or iPhone) and tap on " Mute audio ".
Here are 4 options: mute the audio for 8 hours, a week or a year and then whether to show notifications or not.
removing the notifications the messages will still be received but on the smartphone you will not receive any notice for new interventions in chat.
You can reactivate audio and notifications from the same group chat options button by tapping on " activate audio ".
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In the general settings of Whatsapp, in the notifications section, you can choose how to view group message notifications that have separate options compared to private message notifications.
You can then choose a different sound, a different color of the LED (on mobile phones with a flashing LED) and whether to use vibration.
If you choose " none " as the notification tone, there will be no sound signaling a message from the groups you are chatting with.
Finally, note that group chats also have notification of the message received with a double blue tick in Whatsapp .
The double blue check appears if the message is read by all the participants in the chat, otherwise, you must touch and hold on your message and then press the i on the top menu to find out who has read it in the group .
In the next few days the Whatsapp group chat will have a new function showing, in real time, who is writing and what, a bit like MSN Messenger did in its time.
Whatsapp is, clearly, the best group chat application, even if due to the limitations of broadcasting, many of the features of Telegram channels are missing.
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