Found new odd behavior in my long chats, which seems to have started sometime after 10am est for me. I have used Chatgpt to help me explain what the issue is, concerning what I personally call the conversation history/timeline bar and Chatgpt calls the ‘right-side prompt navigator’.
The right-side prompt navigator in long conversations no longer persists when reopening the chat. It disappears after leaving the conversation and only reappears after scrolling far enough upward for older messages to progressively load. Once it appears, its internal scroll position is unstable and jumps to the top or bottom when navigating to prompts outside the currently visible region. Previously, the navigator remained available across visits and retained its position.
There is also another issue with how chats are loading for me: now when I scroll back up, there is a loading icon as the chat has to load the previous context/prompts/messages. All of this is making navigation difficult and longer for me.
Adding additional context and I don’t know if this helps at all, but once again I made Chatgpt write what I noticed, more concisely:
“In long chats, older history now appears to load in batches of six user prompts. The right-side prompt navigator first appears at six prompts in shorter chats, and in long chats a loading spinner appears approximately every six prompts while scrolling upward. The navigator no longer persists between visits and only reappears after enough historical batches have been loaded.”
Hi @InnocentStar,
Could you clarify where you’re experiencing this, ChatGPT on the web or the desktop app? If it’s on the web, which browser and operating system are you using?
Also, do you mean the panel opened by the “Toggle summary” button in the upper-right corner? That is how it’s labelled for me on the desktop app, while on the web the same panel shows Outputs and Sources. A screenshot would help confirm that we’re looking at the same feature.
It is on the desktop app and via the Chatgpt website in browser (Chrome, Windows 11). I do not have anything labeled ‘Toggle summary’ or anything labeled ‘Outputs and Sources’. I am referring to this section that I circled in blue:
Ah, now I understand which element you mean. I’ve had that right-side prompt marker rail before too, but it’s currently gone for me on both the web version and Windows app.
When it comes to this, if you have Windows desktop app, this is toggle summary (same on the web) but this is not related to what you’re pointing out:
Hopefully someone else can explain the behavior, since there’s nothing documented (currently).
when would this be resolved?
I met the same issue, but there was no “Toggle Summary” or anything similar for me.
I have windows 10 and I have that sidebar in only certain chats, but when I open a different chat, it has NOTHING. I really hope to god this will get fixed, because I need this back. It helps me come back to my chats when I need to remember something specific or important to me. Otherwise, I have to scroll up so much just to find that chat, just to also end up MISSING IT, and lose my mind.
As a workaround, try Search and enter a keyword or phrase you remember. It will show where that phrase appears and which chat contains it. This won’t restore the missing prompt-marker rail, but it may help you locate the information without manually scrolling through every chat.
As for the prompt-marker rail/sidebar, I think OpenAI staff should clarify whether its disappearance is a bug or an intentional change.
Yeah well when you want something that you need, you don’t wanna have to scroll up just to find certain parts, which makes it so annoying, and OpenAI staff need to look into that as soon as possible and get an answer when they could, cause this is pissing me off.
I am using crome incognito. I used to have right-side prompt navigator for long chats. There are more than 50 prompts but I checked today it was missing. With out this feature it would be difficult to check and will lose so much time.
As a workaround, you can click on ‘Share’ on the top right. The public URL will be copied to the clipboard. Open that URL in a new tab and the right-side prompt navigator will load in that new tab. The navigator will still not be available in your current tab though.
