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businessdirect
Community Member

How to print an entire Upwork message thread

As a client, I find the messages exchanged between myself and a hired freelancer something that should be preserved offline, either on paper, or as a PDF. The sometimes months of messages that are exchanged can be useful months or years later, if those messages contain details about the operation of a program that is being developed, for example. Things that may have been forgotten during the development can be reviewed if the project's message thread between the client and freelancer can be saved/printed/exported to the client's hard drive.

 

Yet, despite what would seem to be an obvious need, I have failed to find any way to do just that. Simply using Firefox or Chrome's or IE's "Print" or "Save As" functions, you cannot get the ENTIRE message thread preserved offline.

 

Why is this? Does it make sense to have no option of being able to refer back to an old project's communication/message thread other than by being connected to Upwork's Inbox?

ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Hi Steve,

 

I understand the importance of having this function available in the user interface. Unfortunately, we don't have any new information about this at the moment. We'll definitely let the Community know if anything changes in this area. Meanwhile, our support team is able to assist with exporting all messages. A quick way to contact support is by clicking the "Get Support" button that shows at the bottom right corner of the Upwork Help page

 

Thank you.

~ Aleksandar
Upwork

View solution in original post

66 REPLIES 66
prantu
Community Member

Hi Vlad,
As far as I know, UW does not allow to share a javascript and inspire someone to inject code via console though it is an innocent script (Can any mod please confirm that?)

About your script-- It breaks the whole page after initiating the print sequence so it is not very user-friendly from my point of view. Also, some pages were missing in the print preview.
________________________

"I'm silently judging your font choice."

17b159e9
Community Member

I dont want to fiddle. 

 

  • printing to PDF isn't working, messages are missing
  • save as HTML, looks quite raw

Even better, or on top of export message thread, it would be to fully email enable a disucussion:

 

  • receiving clean copies from those who work on UW UI
  • replying to such emails by email, showing it in UW UI
  • send new email to message therad

For now we switch to email, as Skype etc. isn't much better. And lately it can be cosidered more secure - even sent plain text.

8bae074d
Community Member

Hi there

I see you can print a message thread but wondering if you can download one? Mine has tons of useful information that I want to sort - I have tried copying and pasting but that only seems to work in chunks and it's a long one..!

 

Thank you!

Hi Eleanor,

 

Unfortunately, there is no option to download all messages in a Message room at once.

~ Valeria
Upwork

I dont see why upwork would make this so difficult.  I feel it protects the freelancer but then they might feel it protects the customer because both have to refer back possibly through pages and pages of disjointed chats to find quotes and agreements in chats that have or have not been met.  I have lost money too many times through upwork and this weakness really doesnt help.  This is a portal full of web developers yet Upwork cant do something this basic ??

Hi Andrew,

Unfortunately we don`t have this option available at this moment but thank you for your feedback, I will share this with our product managers.

~ Goran
Upwork

This has been an issue since 2015, (I sure even earlier) if the PM doesn't know it already then what is the point of pointing out issues? 

 

What the PM needs to do is provide a Roadmap as to when things will be fixed. Seeing that this issue is basically 2.5 years old, I'm sure their existing roadmap already has this issue listed and publishing the roadmap would solve a lot of problems.

 

So please ask the PM to post the roadmap here. Then it will give everyone an ETA as to when it will be fixed.

I gave up expecting UPwork to do something about it. For long projects I now chat with my dev. only via Skype. Over there it's easier to scroll through chat history.

Very poor "support" of upwork in this matter! Empty promisses and silly recomendations on how to get around it but no solutions ... just cheap talk and no action since 4 yrears.... Why don't you just tell it how it is? You simply do not want upwork users to be able to download converstion history.... 

This is really poor customer service. You are driving people away from using your built in system because of the lack of this feature. 

 

Why not just implement a history? Maybe you should hire a freelancer on upwork to build it for you 🙂

Hi upwork just trying to bump this thread, this feature would be incredibly helpful!

Hi Adrian,

 

Thanks for sharing your suggestion. Unfortunately, we don't have any additional information about the feature requested.

 

Thank you.

~ Aleksandar
Upwork
1be1d25b
Community Member

STILL no solution from UW?

AveryO
Community Manager
Community Manager

Hi Jim, 


I responded to your other post. 


~ Avery
Upwork
0e6a5c04
Community Member

why not respond here so we can all know? rather than chrage us more every year, how about doing something we actually need for years now?

The fact that this feature doesn't exist is really weird. But not surprising when you know Upwork's... IT agility.

 

 

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"Where darkness shines like dazzling light"   —William Ashbless
vlmo
Community Member

Hi, you can check some code based solution just by searching gist.github.com with a text of current thread's title (for some reason Upwork doesn't like such links:) )

 

619f6f19
Community Member

Thanks Vlad!  I used your script and it worked perfectly.  Saved everything to a PDF file, and only had to modify the pixel height from your code.  Easy to run in the Firefox console, and worked right from the start.

 

No reason why Upwork could not incorporate this into their system.

 

Excellent work!

 

Hi Upwork community!

 

If Upwork doesn't have this feature, why not take a screenshot/ or scrollshot.

I tried doing a scrollshot using my phone and I was able to save the entire conversation.

 

I have a Huawei P30Lite. 

Hope this helps.

 

-Althea M.

417dcebe
Community Member

I also would like to be able to export an entire message thread. I am confident that there are many users who would, as well. It is such a basic feature. And it does not reflect well on Upwork that it hasn't  been added by now.

Hi Steve,

 

I understand the importance of having this function available in the user interface. Unfortunately, we don't have any new information about this at the moment. We'll definitely let the Community know if anything changes in this area. Meanwhile, our support team is able to assist with exporting all messages. A quick way to contact support is by clicking the "Get Support" button that shows at the bottom right corner of the Upwork Help page

 

Thank you.

~ Aleksandar
Upwork
8f0c22b7
Community Member

I just tried it, and it worked for me.   I was able to download the entire chat history in HTML format.

 

1.  Go the the message you want to save.

2.  Scroll all the up to the first day of the history.

3.  On the browser(I tried it on Chrome and Firefox both worked) click on File and then Save Page As...

4. Save the file on your computer.  Now you can open it up anytime, and it will show the entire chat history in HTML format.   

91eaf3f2
Community Member

>"scroll all the up to the first day of the history"

Except that's the whole problem. I have a very long thread and I have to click 50 times on the vertical scrollbar to get to the beginning of the thread. Not only that: the slightest mistake, like closing the page, or opening an external link with put you back at the end of the thread, which means I'll have to click the vertical scrollbar 50 times again. Very painful. The issue here isn't saving the thread to HTML, PDF or Word. The issue is being able to view the entire thread at once, without painful scrolling and losing your spot if you do something.

64b76ff5
Community Member

This solution works for me:

  1. Select the entire thread (click on the begining of the thread and then move to the end of the thread via the scroll bar slider and use "Shift+Left-Click" to mark the end of the region you want to be selected (entire thread).
  2. Use OneNote Web Clipper to save the entire selected thread into OneNote.
  3. In OneNote, print the saved thread to PDF via the menu: File>Export (or File>Print).

I was able to quickly and easily save the entire, multi-month, communication thread.

03829da4
Community Member

Greetings. While Upwork should have this basic function already after almost a decade of people asking, this is still easily achievable. The time this method takes depends on how long the chat history is.

 

Method:

Use Safari, open the chat you want to save, scroll to the beginning of the chat, then click File, Save As, change the format to Web Archive, name it whatever and save it. Done.

 

You can then open the generated file in a web browser, or just click it once and hit Space on a Mac to preview it. Looks almost identical to the website with all media loaded, and you can scroll up and down, use 'Find', etc like normal.

 

Bonus tip:

Use the old version of Upwork Messages (https://www.upwork.com/messages/?forced) to do it, otherwise the scroll bar doesn't work. Also recommend bookmarking that link to use the old Upwork Messages for daily use anyway, because IMO it's far better than the new Messages and even after over a year of asking Upwork multiple times for fixes to 2 basic things that they removed from the old Messages that render it useless for my daily workflow, they've still yet to fix them and instead continue to focus on how best to drive people away from the platform with "improved" fees, etc. that penalize and exploit the most vulnerable with easy pickings.

 

Peace.

Hi Conrad,

 

Is the above method still applicable? Hope we aren't breaking any rules using this method?

fcompany
Community Member

and you still haven't fixed this, 2 years later???

 

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