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Comment by arprocter | Hacker News Reader

They recently changed something in Teams (I first noticed at the beginning of June) - now if you don't move your mouse for 5 mins it automatically marks you 'idle' and...stops receiving messages. Then when you move the mouse all the messages people sent while you were idle arrive at once.

If you don't run it on your main machine this becomes pretty annoying pretty fast, and there doesn't seem to be an option anywhere to change 'mark me idle after' time

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At my previous job I had to tell people to completely ignore my status and presume I'm marked as online because I couldn't get it to stop marking me as Away. I'd be programming for a couple hours, only to realize I had been marked as away that entire time.

It also seems to mark you as 'in a meeting' whenever there's anything on your Outlook calendar, so if you block out lunch...

I find the auto idle exceedingly frustrating - sometimes it doesn't kick in, sometimes it kicks in very quickly. Sometimes i have to restart the whole application to get it to flip back to Available.

I don’t even look at the indicators anymore. A lot of people get stuck on yellow or red and never change to green.

They seem to have a strategy to make every feature worse over time. For a long time voice calls worked well but it seems their feature worsening strategy has finally reached voice calls and I constantly have people drop off or bad voice quality.

Oh thank god it's not just me, I searched around and couldn't figure out what was going

I've missed soooo many notifications because of this garbage I have to remember to manually go check it.

Yeah - I spent a while searching 'teams message delay' etc. and even contacted our 365 admins to see if something was wrong with my account

Didn't occur to me that 'idle' would cause messages to stop coming in

That idle time seriously needs an option to change it. It's stupid how it works now.

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