Hello 
Important note before I begin:
This is a follow-up to my feature request from July 22, 2026, and not an intentional duplicate of the same request.
Original feature request from July 22, 2026
I already described this problem in detail at that time. However, something important has happened since then:
The exact problem I warned about has now actually occurred during my real-world use of ChatGPT.
For this reason, I would like to add this concrete case to my previous feature request and explain why this function can cause a significant problem for certain workflows.
What this is about
ChatGPT automatically collapses longer messages behind the “Show more” button.
I regularly use ChatGPT for longer and sometimes very extensive topics and projects. Over time, these conversations can become very large.
When a conversation becomes too large or too slow, I archive the existing conversation as a PDF using programs such as FireShot. I then start a new ChatGPT conversation and provide the archived conversations there as reference documents.
This is intended to preserve important information from previous conversations, such as:
- tests that have already been carried out,
- identified errors and their causes,
- solutions that worked,
- attempted solutions that did not work,
- settings and original values,
- previous decisions,
- important background information,
- and especially my own detailed explanations of a problem.
The last point is particularly important to me.
When I have to explain a complicated issue to ChatGPT, I sometimes invest a great deal of time and patience in describing all relevant information as completely and clearly as possible.
Such messages can naturally become very long.
And it is precisely these long messages that are often automatically collapsed behind “Show more.”
On August 27, exactly what I warned about on July 22 actually happened
Today, together with ChatGPT, I wanted to search one of my older conversations that I had archived as a PDF for a very detailed explanation that I had written myself.
Specifically, I was looking for previous improvement suggestions concerning FireShot.
We deliberately searched through the old reference documents.
We were actually able to find the original message and read the beginning of my detailed explanation.
Then we encountered exactly the problem:
The archived message ended at “Show more.”
The remaining part of my original detailed explanation was not fully present in the archived version.
When the conversation was originally archived, FireShot saved the webpage as it was displayed at that time. If a long ChatGPT message is collapsed at that moment, only that visible state may therefore be present in the later archive.
As a result, ChatGPT was unable today to recover or read the missing part of my previous explanation from the PDF reference document.
This means that the exact scenario I had already described in my feature request on July 22, 2026 has now actually occurred.
Why this is a serious problem for me
A detailed explanation into which I had previously invested a great deal of time and effort was not completely preserved in my reference document.
This is particularly problematic for my workflow.
The purpose of archiving my old conversations is precisely to avoid having to explain complicated matters from the beginning over and over again.
If important parts of my own messages are missing from the archive, a later conversation no longer has a complete reference document.
ChatGPT may then be missing exactly the information that I originally spent a considerable amount of time explaining in detail.
In the worst case, I have to explain and write out the same complicated issue all over again at a later date.
I cannot get that time back — and avoiding exactly this unnecessary repetition is one of the main reasons why I archive my conversations in the first place.
The problem is not simply FireShot itself
I would like to make it clear that I do not simply want to blame FireShot for this problem.
Programs such as FireShot or GoFullPage generally capture what is displayed on the webpage.
If ChatGPT has already collapsed a long message behind “Show more,” that collapsed state may therefore also be carried over into the later archive.
For my use case, I currently lack a reliable way to ensure, before creating such an archive, that every message in the entire conversation is fully expanded.
With very long conversations containing many messages, it is hardly practical to manually search through the entire conversation for every individual “Show more” button and expand each message one by one.
It only takes one overlooked message.
And that one message may contain an especially important and detailed explanation.
Why my PDFs need to be complete reference documents
For me, these archived conversations are not simply screenshots of old chats.
They form a working archive and reference system.
For example, if Conversation No. 1 contains the initial investigations, Conversation No. 2 contains further tests and results, and Conversation No. 3 continues the work, I provide the previous conversations again as reference documents.
This allows the work to continue from where we previously left off.
However, this only works reliably if the archived conversations are complete.
If long and detailed user messages in particular are missing, such a reference document only works partially.
What I find especially problematic is this:
The longest messages may be precisely the ones in which a user has invested the most time trying to explain a complicated matter to ChatGPT as accurately and completely as possible.
In my opinion, these are exactly the kinds of important details that should not effectively be lost during later archiving simply because the message was automatically collapsed in the user interface.
My request and possible solutions
I would therefore like to reinforce my feature request from July 22 based on this case, which has now actually occurred.
I would greatly appreciate it if you could consider whether ChatGPT could provide, for example, one of the following options in the future:
- An optional “Always show long messages in full” setting that permanently disables the automatic “Show more” behavior.
- An “Expand all messages” function that expands every collapsed message in a conversation with a single click.
- When printing, saving, or exporting a conversation, the complete content of every message could always be used automatically, regardless of its current on-screen state.
Even one of these options — particularly a global “Always show all messages in full” setting or an “Expand all messages” button — would significantly improve this problem.
I do not want “Show more” to be removed for everyone
I understand that ChatGPT is used by many people in many different ways.
Not every user works with very long conversations or later archives them as reference documents.
Therefore, I explicitly do not want to demand that “Show more” be removed for all users.
An optional setting would be completely sufficient.
Users who prefer the automatic collapsing of long messages could continue to use it.
Users who need complete conversations for their work could disable it.
Why I am writing this follow-up
My original feature request from July 22, 2026 mainly described the risk that important information might eventually be missing from archived conversations when using my workflow.
On August 27, 2026, exactly that situation actually occurred.
We did not merely assume that this had happened.
We deliberately searched my old PDF reference documents for a previous detailed message, found the beginning, and then discovered that the important remaining content was not fully present in the archived material because it had been collapsed behind “Show more” at the time.
For this reason, I would like this post to be understood specifically as a follow-up containing a concrete real-world case and new findings, and not as an attempt to simply publish my original feature request a second time.
I sincerely hope that my use case is understandable and that there may be a way in the future to give users greater control over whether their long messages are automatically collapsed.
Thank you very much for taking the time to read this detailed feedback and for considering the suggestion again.