iMessage Issues

[Macnificant]

I am in a group iMessage chat with 19 other parents from my son baseball team. When the group chat started over a year ago the coach started the chat with a group of 19 and sent a few messages but he realized he missed one parent so he deleted the group and started a new group iMessage chat with the correct number of parents.

Ever since he deleted the original group of 19 parents and started a new group for some reason some people are getting messages in the original group chat and some are getting messages in the new group.

We have deleted the first group and second group but for some reason the messages are coming in two different threads. Both showing 20 members.

Has anyone ever heard of the glitch or know how to fix it?

 

[AZhappyjack]

We did something similar with my work team... we discovered that some of the people were replying in the old group, which kept it going... and it's simple enough to add a new person to the group or slap a name on the group AS LONG AS ALL MEMBERS OF THE GROUP ARE ON iOS... but if there is even one non-iOS person in the group, the only option is to start over (and it cannot be named)... I see that as a major shortfall within iOS... we add and change members of our team fairly frequently... and dealing with the message group is a nightmare.

 

[BigBlur]

Is it actually an iMessage group chat (are the bubbles blue)? I mean, all 21 parents having iPhones would be pretty impressive...but it seems unlikely. If the bubbles are green (which I'm guessing they are), then you are just using regular texting or SMS like in the good ol' days, and that has quirks of its own. One of which is that carriers can limit how many people are in a group text. Verizon, for example, limits group texts to 20 people. It sounds like you are just hitting 21 people now, which could cause the the behavior you're seeing.

We also had a similar situation at work many years ago. 19 people would receive the text from the sender, and the rest didn't. Most of those received the text appearing to be a 20 person group text, but a few received the text appearing to be a 10 or 15 person group text (their carrier cut off the other 5 or 10 people). Hopefully that make sense.

With that many people in a group chat, it's best to ensure everyone is using iMessage, or have everyone use something else like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, or email.