[ChatGPT Web] Pin state and sidebar organization mode can hide Recents

What issue are you seeing?

On ChatGPT Web (chatgpt.com), the visibility of the Recents section is being incorrectly affected by both:

• whether a chat is pinned; and
• the Organize chats mode (In one list vs By project).

After additional testing, this is reproducible as a sidebar filtering/grouping bug rather than simply normal history trimming.

Environment

• Surface: ChatGPT Web (chatgpt.com)
• Browser: Chrome on macOS
• Plan: ChatGPT Pro
• Observed: 2026-08-17

Deterministic reproduction

The account has several pinned projects and, in the affected state, exactly one pinned chat.

Case A — In one list with one pinned chat

1. Open ChatGPT Web with the sidebar expanded.
2. Keep one ordinary chat pinned.
3. Open the Recents ... menu and select Organize chats → In one list.
4. Most of the expected recent chats disappear from Recents; the full recent list is not rendered.
5. Unpin that chat.
6. Without losing the underlying conversations, the Recents list repopulates and the previously missing recent chats become visible again in the same browser session.

The pinned chat itself being removed from Recents to avoid duplication would be understandable. The bug is that pinning one chat suppresses unrelated recent chats as well.

Case B — By project

1. With the same account/sidebar state, open the Recents ... menu.
2. Select Organize chats → By project.
3. The Recents content disappears instead of grouping the existing recent conversations by project.

Additional observed symptom

During the original reproduction, the active conversation also displayed:

Something went wrong. Please try again.

The rest of the ChatGPT page and other sidebar sections remained usable.

Further pin/unpin and organization-mode testing now shows that the visibility failure can be triggered by sidebar state itself, which makes this look more specifically like a Recents filtering/grouping or state-synchronization problem. A backend history-load failure cannot be ruled out, but pin state clearly changes the rendered result.

Expected behavior according to OpenAI documentation

OpenAI's June 18, 2026 ChatGPT release notes document the Web behavior explicitly:

You can pin chats and projects directly from the sidebar, and your Pinned section now includes both chats and projects. You can also organize Recents as one combined list, or group chats by project so related work stays together.

Official source:
https://help.openai.com/en/articles/6825453-chatgpt-release-notes

The current documentation set is also exposed through:

• https://learn.chatgpt.com/llms.txt
• https://learn.chatgpt.com/llms-full.txt

Based on the documented behavior:

• pinning one chat should not hide unrelated recent chats;
• In one list should render the eligible recent-chat list;
• By project should group eligible recent chats by project rather than blanking the Recents section.

Actual behavior

• Pinned projects remain visible.
• A pinned chat remains visible in Pinned.
• With one chat pinned, In one list can suppress most Recents.
• Switching to By project can make Recents disappear.
• Unpinning the chat restores the larger Recents list.
• The conversations therefore appear to remain present; their sidebar visibility changes with pin/grouping state.

This is materially different from intentional sidebar history limiting because the same recent conversations reappear when only the pin state changes.

External corroboration from other ChatGPT Web users

Two recent user reports are particularly close to this reproduction:

1. Pinned-chat state causing apparently missing chats, with unpinning restoring them. A Reddit report describes chats appearing missing because pinned chats were not rendering correctly; users in the thread reported that locating the conversation and choosing Unpin Chat caused the missing chats to reappear in the sidebar. This closely matches the deterministic reproduction above where unpinning the sole pinned chat restores Recents.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1rxqvj9/for_those_missing_chats_pinned_chats_are_failing/

1. Pinned sidebar state becoming inconsistent together with a /backend-api/pins failure. A separate recent Reddit report describes the Pinned section disappearing and troubleshooting that observed /backend-api/pins returning 403 Permission denied. The report also describes partial recovery after session renewal while pin state remained inconsistent.

https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1vchcal/pinned_chats_disappeared_from_the_chatgpt_sidebar/

These are user reports, not proof of the same root cause, but they materially strengthen the possibility that pin-state retrieval/filtering and sidebar rendering can become inconsistent independently of whether the conversations themselves still exist.

A separate OpenAI Developer Community report also documents a ChatGPT Web history-loading failure where recent chats remained accessible through Search/direct URLs while the recent-history request failed, including an observed HTTP 500 from the conversations endpoint:

• Unable to load history: Recent chats are not loading (July 2026)
• https://community.openai.com/t/unable-to-load-history-recent-chats-are-not-loading/1385975

That suggests there may be more than one failure path in this area: a backend recent-history request can fail, and pin/grouping state can also alter which already-existing chats are rendered.

Why this matters

This creates the appearance that chat history has disappeared even though the conversations are still present. It also makes the two documented Recents organization modes unreliable and makes pinning a chat unexpectedly destructive to navigation/discoverability.

Requested investigation

Please investigate the ChatGPT Web sidebar logic that derives and renders Recents, including interaction between:

1. the set of pinned chat IDs;
2. the candidate Recents collection;
3. In one list filtering;
4. By project grouping;
5. projectless chats vs project chats;
6. client cache/memoization invalidation after pin/unpin;
7. /backend-api/pins; and
8. any separate recent-history request such as the conversations endpoint used by these views.

In particular, please verify that:

• excluding a pinned chat from Recents cannot accidentally exclude unrelated chats or collapse the full candidate list;
• By project can render all eligible groups even when pinned chats/projects exist;
• a failed pin/history request cannot silently blank Recents while Pinned/Projects or Search still work; and
• the client exposes a recoverable error/retry state when these requests fail.

ChatGPT Web feedback submission

I submitted the same behavior through the ChatGPT Web /feedback flow on 2026-08-17.

The Web feedback submission completed, but the browser feedback flow did not display or return a Feedback ID, so there is no Feedback ID available to include here. This GitHub issue is the durable public reference for the report.

Related reports

There is also an established family of Codex/Desktop sidebar/history visibility reports where conversations remain intact but are omitted from rendered history, including:

• #20833
• #21128
• #23979
• #37853
• #38928

Those reports concern Desktop/Codex state. This report is specifically about ChatGPT Web and now has a pin/unpin + organization-mode reproduction.

Privacy

No conversation titles, conversation IDs, project names, account identifiers, private URLs, or private conversation content are included in this report. Screenshots demonstrating the two sidebar states are available if maintainers need them.