As of October 2026, Recents still incorrectly mixes Project chats with standalone chats

ChatGPT Feature requests
1

I’m reporting a significant UX regression in ChatGPT’s Recents and Projects organization.

Date of this report: October 6, 2026.

This issue is not new. A community discussion about the same problem was already closed on September 8, 2026, yet the underlying issue is still present today.

The problem

Previously, Recents had a very useful and intuitive behavior:

Projects = organized conversations
Recents = standalone conversations that have not been assigned to a Project

Once I moved a conversation into a Project, it no longer cluttered the general Recents list.

That made Recents function like an inbox: conversations that still needed to be organized stayed there, while conversations that had already been organized stayed inside their respective Projects.

That behavior was extremely useful.

What is happening now

Project conversations are being surfaced in the global Recents view.

I have already disabled:

Recents → ⋯ → Show → Projects

This reduces the amount of Project content shown, but it does NOT restore the previous behavior.

Other conversations still appear in Recents that should not be there if Recents is supposed to represent standalone/unassigned conversations.

The result is a redundant and cluttered navigation experience.

The missing functionality

What is needed is very simple:

Recents → Show only chats that are NOT assigned to a Project

In other words:

Standalone / Unassigned chats only

This is fundamentally different from simply hiding the “Projects” category.

The current filtering does not provide a reliable way to achieve this.

Why this matters

I use Projects as actual workspaces for organizing large amounts of ongoing work.

When conversations that are already organized inside Projects continue appearing in global Recents, Recents becomes a duplicate, noisy version of the sidebar rather than a useful inbox for unorganized conversations.

This increases the time required to find genuinely standalone conversations and undermines the organizational purpose of Projects.

Timeline

This problem was already being discussed publicly before September 8, 2026, when the relevant community thread was closed.

Today is October 6, 2026, and the issue is still reproducible.

So this is not simply a request for a new preference or a minor UI preference. It is a workflow regression that has remained unresolved after the original reports were already closed.

Requested fix

Please either:

  1. Restore the previous behavior where conversations assigned to Projects do not appear in the general Recents list,

or

  1. Add an explicit filter:

“Standalone / Unassigned chats”

which shows ONLY conversations that do not belong to any Project.

Please escalate this to the product team responsible for Projects and conversation navigation.

I am specifically asking for the previous organizational behavior to be restored or for an equivalent filtering mechanism to be provided. The current “Projects OFF” option does not accomplish that.

Thanks

2

Android exposes the other side of this trade-off.

On my account, Project chats can be absent from the main Recents list, which is fine for decluttering, but when a Project chat receives a new response there is no Project-level unread indicator. Web/Desktop can show an unread blue dot, while Android may show nothing obvious.

If Project chats are hidden from Recents, Projects need to propagate unread state: a dot on the Project, then a dot on the specific updated conversation. That would preserve a clean Recents view without making new activity invisible on mobile.