Hi everyone,
I encountered a strange issue with one of my long conversations and I’m trying to see if anyone else has experienced something similar.
Chat title: “Sibling dynamic· Elias and Elena Killinger”
Summary:
After editing an earlier prompt in a long conversation, the chat suddenly rewound to that edited point and approximately 300+ later messages disappeared from the visible timeline.
However, the missing messages still appear in ChatGPT history search results, which suggests they may still exist in the system.
Sequence of events:
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I was using the mobile app and tried scrolling up to view older messages.
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The older messages would not load when scrolling up.
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I switched to the web browser version, where the older messages loaded normally.
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I returned to the mobile app and edited one of my earlier prompts in the conversation.
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Immediately after saving the edit, the conversation rewound to that edited message, and all messages after that point disappeared.
Current behavior:
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The conversation now only shows the timeline up to the edited prompt.
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About 300+ subsequent messages are missing.
Important observations:
• The missing messages still appear in ChatGPT history search results
• Clicking those results opens the same conversation but only shows the earlier (rewound) state
• Memories referencing the missing messages still exist and link to the same conversation
Because of this, it seems possible that the original conversation branch still exists but the UI is only showing the edited branch.
Steps I’ve taken:
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Submitted a bug report
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Requested a data export to inspect
conversations.json -
Avoided editing the chat further to prevent overwriting anything
Questions:
Has anyone encountered a similar issue where:
• editing a prompt caused the conversation to rewind, and
• missing messages still appear in history search?
If so, were you able to recover the conversation or did it eventually reappear?
Attached is an image of the search results showing one of the important missing messages.
I plan to attach another image of the edited point where the chat rewound, but I am limited to only posting with one image.
Any insight would be appreciated. Thank you!
