Convoy Chat: Live Messages That Clear Themselves After 7 Days

Why a convoy needs its own thread

Most group drives are coordinated in a chat that was not built for it. Someone makes a group, half the people in it are not driving, and the useful messages are buried between links, photos and a conversation that started three weeks ago.

Then the drive ends and the group stays. It sits in your list forever, going quiet, until someone revives it for a completely different trip and the history stops making sense.

Convoy chat is scoped to one drive and the people on it. Nothing else is in there. When you open it, everything you see is about where this group is right now.

Messages clear themselves after seven days

Every message carries its own expiry, set the moment it is sent. Seven days later, that message is removed.

That is per message, not per conversation. The thread does not sit intact for a week and then disappear in one go - it thins continuously from the oldest end. Open a convoy that has been running a fortnight and you see roughly the last seven days of it, with the beginning already gone while people are still talking.

A convoy that goes quiet empties completely a week after the last message. Nothing is left behind to clean up, because there is no moment where anyone has to decide to delete it.

• Each message expires seven days after it was sent, not seven days after the drive
• Older messages go first, so the order of what remains is never broken
• New messages never extend the life of older ones
• A quiet convoy clears itself entirely

Why seven days, and not forever

Almost everything said during a drive has a short shelf life. “Stopping for fuel at the next exit”, “we have lost the blue car”, “three of us are already at the cafe”. These matter enormously for twenty minutes and mean nothing a month later.

Keeping them anyway has a cost. A permanent thread is a permanent record of where a group of people were and when, sitting on a server, waiting to be a problem. Deleting it by default is simply less to go wrong.

Seven days is long enough to be useful and short enough to be forgettable. It covers the drive itself, the argument about which route was faster, and the weekend afterwards when someone wants to check what the plan actually was.

It keeps working after the drive ends

Ending a convoy does not wipe the chat. The live parts of a convoy - positions, who is currently connected - are cleared shortly after it finishes, because a location from a finished drive is not useful to anybody.

The conversation is treated differently on purpose. People read a convoy chat back after they get home, working out where the group split up or who paid for what. Cutting it off the moment the drive ended would delete it exactly when it becomes interesting.

So the chat carries on for its own seven days, whether the convoy is still running or finished hours ago.

Reporting and blocking

Any message from another rider can be reported, and reporting asks you what was wrong with it rather than just registering a complaint. That reason is what lets a real person triage it properly instead of guessing.

The sender is never told who reported them. Convoys are often small groups who know each other, and a report that identifies you is a report nobody files.

You can also block a rider outright, which stops you seeing anything from them. Blocking is confirmed before it takes effect, because it applies everywhere in the app and is easy to trigger by accident on a phone that is being handled at speed.

• Report a message and pick a reason - the team reviews it
• Reports are anonymous to the person reported
• Block a rider to stop seeing their messages anywhere in the app
• Both are reachable from the message itself, not buried in settings

What it is not

It is not a replacement for the group chat you already have with your friends. That one is for planning, for photos, and for the six months between drives. This one is for the drive.

It is also not where the memory of the trip lives. If you want something that lasts, the trip story is the thing that is meant to last - the route, the pitstops, the photos, kept deliberately rather than by accident.

Convoy chat is the opposite of that. It is meant to be used hard for a day and then quietly forgotten.

Final thought

Group chats accumulate. They fill with things that mattered once, and nobody ever goes back to tidy them.

A convoy chat that clears itself is one less thing to think about. Say what needs saying, get where you are going, and let the rest of it go.