I find it really annoying that once I look at a new item and return from it the new item disappears rather than changing to not highlighted. This means that if I need to go back to view it again I have to trawl through the forum to find it. Does this annoy anyone else? Same happens with unread although I normally know which board the item is in since I am following it.
Is there any discourse option which would change this way of working?
Stuart
Yep agree, same here Stuart.
Don’t new/unread posts that you’ve opened appear near the top of the Latest view? If there were hundreds of new posts per day then I guess there might be a long list to look through but with the current volume of posts I’d have thought recent posts would be very near the top of Latest.
Yes correct the Latest view does show them. I’ll see if I can use that instead of clicking on New or Unread.
Stuart
Just checked the Latest view on another much busier forum and the issue with using that is that the new items are not always at the top or anywhere near it since this also shows updated threads which are not new and not shown as unread for me as they are not being monitored by me!
So yes it can be used but it’s not the ideal situation in my view.
Stuart
I’m not aware of a way to make it operate how you’d like and actually think it’s not logical for three forum to work that way.
The Unread and New options are views of unread and new posts. Once you’ve read a post it’s no longer unread or new so it shouldn’t appear in those views. The view is populated each time you visit it so the query would need to be something like ‘find unread posts and also any read posts that were unread after some time in the past’. That mechanism could also be a problem on a busy forum where your have lots of new posts. If there were 30 new posts and you’d read 28 of them you’d have a lot of extra posts to look through to find the unread posts.
If you want this because you want to go back to refer to the post you could try using bookmarks. I use those a lot to remind me to look at things again, e.g. I can put a bookmark on the search discussion post to remind me to look when I’m on my laptop.
I think the issue here is we are so used to the old forum and its ways. I still don’t understand why the devs refuse to give us a mark all read option for example, makes no sense to me not to have that. As for this issue I sometimes look at a new item and discount it only to need to go back and review it again after some thought and do not always remember which board it is from.
I think it must be that I just liked the old way and cannot see why this is so much better. I understand why it had to change as it has to be supportable but I am not convinced discourse is the best option or in fact the best design.
Stuart
Does activity read history give you the info you need? Profile - Preferences - Activity - Read
Other than wondering where the option was when we first started to use Discourse I haven’t really missed the ‘mark all read’ function once I knew it didn’t exist.
SMF didn’t really give you a timeline view of the forum content, at least not in the same sense that Discourse does. In the old forum, probably like you, I read what I wanted to in a board then marked the board as read, or thought I’d finished reading everything of interest and mark the whole forum read. I no longer feel the need to do that in Discourse though. I use the Latest view to show me what’s new since last time I accessed and can scroll further down the list if I want to go beyond last time (or I can dig into categories/tags or use search to find other stuff of interest). I don’t worry that I have hundreds of thousands of posts marked as unread. I know that posts prior to March this year are likely to be marked unread because I couldn’t easily carry the read markers forward when migrating from the old forum, but I also know that since March if something says it’s unread then I really haven’t read it. It’s just a marker that tells me the status of a specific message. Mark All Read doesn’t really reflect the true message status - you haven’t really read it - you’re using it to reflect something else about how you use the forum.
I really don’t know if Discourse is the absolute best option or has the absolute best design. What I do know is that I searched for replacement forum software for quite a few years and Discourse was the only one in that that time that ticked most of the boxes.
I looked at many different types of software. Some weren’t designed for ‘big’ forums. Some put form over function (you can have as many posts listed on a screen as you like as long as you don’t want more than 4 because our super-duper fancy graphics are so big there’s no room for more). Some were no better supported than the old forum software. Some were commercial, costing hundreds (or thousands) of pounds per year in licensing costs (I didn’t look any further at these). Some didn’t have all the functionality that we used in the old forum.
Some seemed to do what we wanted so I tried installing them but they proved to have significant problems. Some worked and looked OK as an ‘empty’ test and claimed to have SMF migration scripts available, but on closer investigation the scripts were commercial offerings that would have cost me thousands of pounds for a third party to migrate the data across. Others had their own migration scripts…which were really only designed to migrate small forums and even then only a small part of the content we had, e.g. no images. Others had more robust migration scripts, which failed when I tried them, e.g. one script executed for about 24 hours, getting about 50% of the way through before starting to loop and repeat the 50-55% migration section over and over. After trying to fix this a few times I gave up as life is too short to wait 24 hours to see if your last fix had worked (clue - it hadn’t).
After a few years of looking, Discourse really was the only one that:
So, I’ll say again - I really don’t know if Discourse is the absolute best option or has the absolute best design. All I can say is that it’s the best that I could find that met all of our needs.
Chris that profile/prefs/activity /read option is a useful one perhaps. I do understand you did a lot of work to get us to a supported forum and that it does work although not in many ways that me and maybe a few others would like.
I really don’t understand why the devs for discourse are so adamant they have the perfect solution and do not accept things like Mark All Read would be a good idea, after all I use search all the time to see if anyone has reported an issue before.
Anyway it is what it is and lets hope it continues…
Stuart
When I login to the forum I am presented with the “latest” un-read posts. As I read each message and use the back function of my browser I am taken back to my initial view of the forum and the message I just read is now shown as being read. But sometimes when I go “back” I find my view has changed and I am now 2 or 3 screens below the latest unread posts and have to scroll back to the top to continue reading new posts. Why the forum “jumps” is unknown. I was thinking this happens when a member replies/edits and old post that I have already read but when I scroll back to the top the post is still where I left it. Like I say, it doesn’t happen all the time, but now I will be paying more attention to what happens and how the forum reacts.
I’ve looked in the Discourse forum and I only found 3 discussions about Mark All Read in the last 10 years so it doesn’t seem to be something that many people are asking for so I’m not sure why Devs would spend much time adding something so few people seem to want?
It’s possibly the way it is because the forum was designed to suit a particular use case. Discourse appears, to me, to be intended for a large numbers of users with a large numbers of posts. Think about that from a design perspective. You need to record the ‘read’ status of each post for each user. If you assume that everything is unread by default, then you only need to store a record saying user ‘x’ read post ‘y’ when a user reads a message.
So when you log in as a new user you have no ‘read’ status messages. You read a dozen messages and create 12 records. However, assume you have 10 thousand users and 1 million posts (that’s small for some Discourse installations). If each user reads a dozen posts then you’ve now got 120,000 status records which isn’t too bad. If you have Mark All Read each press of the button (by a new user) generates 1 million records just for that user. Experience of running a forum for over 20 years tells me that the vast majority of users read very few messages, so the number of status messages is likely to be fairly small if just ‘post read’ is stored.
There are other ways of doing that, e.g. by storing a high water mark for messages read for each user, but that also complicates the design and queries looking up posts. I suspect that a design decision was made many years ago which would now be difficult to reverse now which is why they don’t want to retro-fit it (and as I mentioned above there seems to be little demand for a change).
I don’t understand how that’s relevant? Mark All Read doesn’t tell you anything about someone reporting an issue. All it does it mark all records read for your user.
I guess I’m not really sure what you’re not able to do by not having the functionality. I read what I want to read and don’t read a lot of other stuff. It doesn’t worry me that I’ve got a huge unread message count, although to be honest I don’t know if I can actually see the value anywhere.
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