Ask Away: How can I bail on this annoying group chat?

Not you again! Here's how to do away with annoying online group conversations without offending anyone. Photo / Rawpixels via Pexels

Eleanor Barker answers your travel questions.

Hi Captain Ask Away,

I was recently on a tour with lovely people - none of whom I'd ever met before. We set up a WhatsApp group to organise activities, share photos, etc. Anyway, it's now been more than a month and the WhatsApp group is still buzzing. I don't want to offend them (they're nice people!), but I don't want to hear their banal thoughts any longer (they're not that interesting!). How do I get out without ruffling feathers?

George

Ah, this sounds familiar and I'm sure many readers can relate. I personally get a lot of satisfaction from sneakily ghosting on annoying online interactions. I once blocked a selfie-fond family member, knowing it would look like I had deleted my account. I needed to escape her daily face updates and I figured "How is she going to know I haven't actually left?" And as far as I am aware, she never did. I learned later that my sister had done the same thing.

There's all sorts of things you can block these days online. Condom-maker Skyn made headlines last week for releasing a Chrome plugin called Baby Blocker that replaces Facebook images of human babies with something less offensive. Another plugin replaces every instance of the word millennial with "pesky whipper-snapper", which I personally enjoy very much. You can even block the Royal baby.

Putting to the side all this online magic, electronic muting is my best recommendation for you — and for everyone. Most messaging platforms offer a muting function these days. You can find the feature by jumping into the group conversation (hopefully for the last time) and touching the topmost grey bar with the group name and the numbers of the people in it. From there you will pull up the Group Info menu with the mute option being the fifth option down. WhatsApp allows for muting for eight hours, a week or a year. Perfect for that baby birth chat, netball gab or boring tour banter that you will only want to catch up with sometimes. The process of doing this for Facebook messenger is very similar.

Finally, you should DEFINITELY update your WhatsApp app at the same time you acquaint yourself with the mute function. WhatsApp fell victim to a "targeted" surveillance attack last week. Do this by looking up WhatsApp in your phone's app store and hit the update button.