What Happened: Janitor AI pushed a UI update on April 24, 2026 that broke the delete-messages button, changed auto-scroll behavior, and cramped the chat layout. The r/JanitorAI_Official sub is flooded with complaint threads, and the devs have not acknowledged the specific regressions yet.
Janitor AI pushed a new UI update in the last 24 hours and the delete-messages button stopped working for users across the platform.
The same update changed the auto-scroll behavior, tightened the chat layout, moved the fork button, and kicked off a wave of complaint threads on r/JanitorAI_Official that started piling up within minutes of the rollout.
I have been watching the sub all morning, and the pattern is identical to the last three UI pushes. Something shipped, something broke, and the devs have not acknowledged the specific regressions yet.
The April 2026 update appears to be a client-side UI overhaul, not a backend change. That matters because most of the affected stuff is stuck in a queue with the devs, not something you can fix by switching proxies, clearing cache, or trying a different model. If you already tried all of those and nothing worked, this is why.
I will walk through every confirmed issue from the last 24 hours, the workarounds that help today, and where frustrated users are going while they wait for a patch. If you are getting an error trying to delete a message right now, you are not alone, and the fault is not on your end.
What Actually Happened
The Janitor AI April 2026 update is a client-side UI overhaul that shipped on April 24 and broke multiple chat features on release.
Based on what I have seen in the top 15 threads on r/JanitorAIOfficial since yesterday evening, the update changed the chat interface on web and mobile web without a changelog, and at least four distinct features regressed at the same time. The top complaint thread, “can’t delete messages”, crossed 35 comments in under six hours. Adjacent threads on the new UI, auto-scroll behavior, and the moved fork button are all pointing at the same push.
What is Janitor AI: Janitor AI is a free character-roleplay chatbot platform that lets users chat with community-created bots using JLLM, Deepseek, or bring-your-own-key models.
Here are the confirmed regressions from the April 24 update, in order of how many separate complaint threads each one has generated:
- Delete message button is non-functional. Clicking the delete button on any chat message does nothing, returns a silent error, or briefly hides the message before it reappears. This is the most-reported issue.
- Auto-scroll jumps to the top of the chat on new message. Before the update, the chat pinned to the latest message. After the update, new messages load the scroll position at the top of the history, forcing a manual scroll every turn.
- Chat UI is visibly tighter. Padding reduced, message spacing shrunk, font-size adjusted on mobile web. Users are calling it “cramped” and reporting eye strain on longer sessions.
- Fork button moved. The fork-message button shifted position and some users cannot find it at all on mobile.
- Some accounts report an automatic quote-mark formatter. Not universal, but several users say the client is inserting quote marks around text they did not type that way.
For the full picture:
| Affected feature | Severity | Workaround available |
|---|---|---|
| Delete messages | Critical (safety/agency) | None server-side; see Section 3 |
| Auto-scroll on new message | High (usability) | Partial (scroll manually each turn) |
| Cramped chat UI | Medium (comfort) | Browser zoom or dark mode |
| Moved fork button | Medium (feature access) | Hunt for it under new icon |
| Unwanted quote formatter | Low (cosmetic) | Manual edit after generation |
None of these are model-side issues. The JLLM regression from April 23, which dropped output quality across the board and is documented separately in Deepseek V4 on Janitor AI, is a different problem.
This update stacks on top of that one. If your chats feel both slower AND more broken than they did last week, both things are real.
The April 2026 AI chatbot market is estimated at roughly 5.4 billion USD according to Statista’s chatbot market outlook, and Janitor AI is one of the five largest free character-chat platforms in that segment. A UI regression on a platform of that size affects a lot of people in a single day.
Why This Is a Bigger Deal Than It Sounds
This update is worse than previous Janitor AI UI regressions because it removes a core safety feature, delete messages, without providing a workaround.
Most UI updates are cosmetic. Padding changes, color shifts, button placement, the kind of stuff that annoys people for a week and then fades into muscle memory. This update is different because one of the broken features is not a nice-to-have, it is a safety valve.
The delete-message button is how users walk back a bad reply, a bot response that strayed off-topic, or a generation that produced something they did not want in their chat history.
On a character-roleplay platform where bots can hallucinate a direction the user is not comfortable with, deleting a message is the built-in way to steer the conversation without losing the whole chat. Taking that away, even temporarily, changes the usability of the product in a meaningful way.
From what I have seen in the complaint threads, the second-order problem is worse than the first. Without the delete button, users are resorting to editing messages in place (which works but changes the original), forking the chat (which loses downstream replies), or deleting the entire chat and starting over.
None of those are the same as a quick targeted delete, and all of them feel disproportionate to the original mistake. That is the friction that is driving the outrage.
The pattern of unannounced UI changes is also generating its own layer of frustration. The “Janitor AI not working” guide covers the usual suspects (proxies, rate limits, model errors), but none of those articles help when the problem is an intentional dev push that broke a client-side feature. Users tried the standard fixes, the fixes did not work, and the comment threads read like people watching a fire they cannot put out.
There is also a trust cost. When a platform rolls changes without a changelog, users lose the ability to diagnose their own problems, and every future bug becomes ambient anxiety.
Is my proxy broken, or is this another silent UI push? That question shows up in almost every thread right now, and it will shape how the community reacts to the next update even after this one is fixed.
What This Means for You
Janitor AI users affected by the April 2026 update have three realistic options while waiting for a patch.
I will not pretend there is a clean fix, because there is not. The broken pieces are server-controlled. What I can offer is a prioritized list of what helps, based on what I have been testing and what users in the threads are reporting works.
Here is the sequence I would walk through right now:
- Stop deleting the whole chat. If the delete-message button is not working, the temptation is to reset the chat and start over. Do not do this. The chat log is still intact even if the button is broken, and the delete functionality will come back in a patch. Save your chats.
- Edit messages in place instead of deleting. Hit the pencil icon on the offending message and rewrite it with a single space or a brief redirect. This does not remove the message, but it neutralizes it and costs you zero chat history.
- Use fork as a last resort. If a reply genuinely cannot be edited around, fork the chat at the message before the problem and continue forward. You will lose replies downstream of the fork, which is the tradeoff.
- Hard-refresh your browser. Some users in the threads report that a Ctrl+Shift+R (or Cmd+Shift+R on Mac) picks up a slightly different build that has the auto-scroll partially fixed. It did not fully fix delete for me, but it is worth 10 seconds of your time.
- Switch to desktop web if you are on mobile. The mobile web version seems to be carrying the worst of the UI regression. Desktop web is not untouched, but the cramped-layout complaint is noticeably softer on larger screens.
If none of that is enough, and you are somewhere that the delete-messages bug is actively interfering with how you use the platform, the pragmatic answer is to keep Janitor open for your existing chats and try a second platform for new sessions until the patch drops.
I covered the main options in my Janitor AI alternatives guide, and the head-to-head comparison in SpicyChat vs Janitor AI is the closest match for people who want a similar character-chat experience without the April 2026 UI mess.
What I would not recommend is making a permanent switch right now. Janitor AI’s dev team has shipped patch rollbacks before (usually within 48 to 96 hours of a visible community backlash), and the cost of re-seeding your bots and chat history elsewhere is high. Treat this as a temporary outage, not a reason to leave.
What Comes Next
From what I have seen of past Janitor AI UI pushes, the community-backlash-to-rollback cycle runs 48 to 96 hours when the backlash is loud enough.
The delete-messages regression is the kind of critical-path bug that usually forces a hotfix inside that window, and the sheer volume of complaint threads suggests the devs are already aware.
My prediction: delete messages gets restored within 72 hours, auto-scroll gets patched within a week, and the cramped-UI padding complaint either gets adjusted or quietly stays as-is. The pattern before has been that usability regressions get fixed when they break safety-adjacent features, and aesthetic regressions get fixed only if the backlash is sustained.
If you have a specific bug to report, the official Janitor AI Discord is the fastest channel, faster than the subreddit by a wide margin. The subreddit is useful for commiseration and workaround discovery; Discord is useful for getting a dev to see the thread. I would not hold my breath on either, but the Discord reply rate has been higher for UI-specific bugs historically.
I will update this article when the patch drops, or when it becomes clear that any of these regressions is permanent rather than accidental. If you want the next Janitor AI story before it hits the front page of the sub, bookmark RR and check back in 48 hours.
