“Mark all as read” functionality. Getting rid of clutter in the “Unread” section is tedious, especially because you need to slowly scroll each thread in order to trick Discourse into thinking you’ve read all replies (otherwise you still get the grey number of “old unread posts”).
I suggest you change topics you aren’t interested in reading from “tracking” to “regular”, like so:
Note that once you reply to a topic it automatically changes to “tracking” by default, so if you don’t want that, be sure to reply, then change it back to regular.
There are topics that I wish to track and have read all the way, but I have a grey icon for whatever reason (reading too fast?) … it would be nice to have a way to mark those posts as read rather than spending time trying to convince Discourse that I really have read all those posts.
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OH SO MUCH THIS! I find it happens a if I read some posts on a thread, then leave it for a while and then come back tot he page and skip to the end. There’s a gap in the middle of posts that are flagged as unread and won’t unflag until they have been loaded on screen.
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I have to agree—this is a big annoyance, and it seems to be tied to scrolling too fast, and it happens in threads where I really have read everything, but I didn’t linger long enough on some posts for Discourse to register them. I really wish there was a way to dismiss those notifications other than manually re-scrolling through a thread to find the missing posts and then staring at them.
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Can you describe specifically how you are doing this? I mean click by click, exactly what is happening, in excruciating detail.
I just did the following:
- Saw the “ozarks kitchen, 1936” topic has 12 new posts in Suggested Topics.
- Clicked the “activity” column on the right that says “2h” to move me to the end of the topic.
- I arrive at the end of the topic.
- Spend a few seconds reading the bottom-most post. 3, maybe 5 seconds tops. I did not read any of the other 11 unread posts in this topic.
- Click on any random topic in Suggested Topics just to trigger a navigation away event
There are no unread posts in that topic for me any more, confirmed by loading BBS in a new window and manually searching for the Ozarks kitchen topic:
Don’t know. I just find that sometimes I have grey bubbles with numbers next to them telling me I have unread posts in a topic. The only way to make them go away is to manually scroll through the entire post.
If you really want to move to the end of a topic, and force it to be “read”, no matter its state, avoid the title of the topic – select the last post time instead. That’s a jump to end link, wherever you see it.
Like so:
The time column can be read in this fashion:
Time of first post → Time of last post
edit: I just tried it on this topic
And after entering the topic at the bottom via the last post link, and lingering on the page for no more than 3 seconds, I had no unread posts in that topic any more.
Next time the bug pops up I’ll try this and let you know
Thanks, @codinghorror, good to know! However, that’s a totally non-obvious thing to do—in fact, until you mentioned it, it hadn’t even occurred to me to check to see if the last post time was clickable.
And now I see that almost all of the numbers in those columns are live links…woah.
Typically I go to http://bbs.boingboing.net/unread and then right-click > open in new tab the various topics that show up. After I read through the topic, I close the tab. Occasionally this will result in a gray dot appearing, but not always. I guess closing the tab does not “trigger a navigation away event”?
Thanks, Jeff!
Is there an equally simple way to stop tracking a specific topic without stopping tracking in general?
Below the bottom post in a thread theres a “tracking” drop down button that lists all the tracking options.
If it’d been a snake it woulda bit me.
Thanks!
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Well, we also need a way to change state on a bunch of topics at once, e.g. “stop tracking these 10 topics”.
It’s less of an issue on BB because the majority of topics auto-close after 5 days, but still, it is on our roadmap.
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Good news: you can now dismiss read topics via the “Dismiss Read” button at the bottom of the Unread tab.
Note that this changes all the topics on your unread list from “tracking” or “watching” state to “regular” state. So you won’t see new post counts on any of those topics again once you press the Dismiss Read button.
A similar Dismiss New button is coming to the new page next week.
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In related news, you will now see a Dismiss New button at the bottom of the New tab.
Clicking or tapping that button does two things
-
clears all currently “New” topics so they are no longer considered New to you
-
only topics created after you last Dismissed New will now be considered new to you
(Note that the default two day window of “newness”, which is editable in your user preferences, is still in effect as well.)
I hope that helps. Enjoy!
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Thanks for these two improvements, codinghorror. I might start calling you “codingdelight” instead.
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How about adding that button at the top, or at least implementing a “jump to bottom” functionality as in regular threads? I had to scroll through 432 “unread” topics that had accumulated over the months to reach the button, and I wouldn’t even know about it if not for this announcement.
