Also, note that grey topic titles are those topics where you have read to the last post:
So… as long as we’re talking about being constantly nagged… can we get a “save for later” option for post drafts?
Several times, I’ve been on my phone, started writing a reply, and realized that it was going to be long and involved enough that I’d rather do it on a real keyboard. At that point, no matter what other threads I navigate to, the “Post draft in progress. Select to resume” message sits at the bottom of the screen reminding of my failure like the beating of the telltale heart.
All it would need is a button next to Reply and Cancel to make it go away without discarding the draft, and then it could just revive itself and remind me to finish the draft the next time I visit that thread.
This already works – simply leave the topic and come back whenever on any device (as the draft is saved on the server). The draft is saved for a period of months, and you can have one draft for every topic.
Test it and see what I mean.
I think he means he’d like a way to do away with the nagging notification of an in-progress post without necessarily getting rid of the draft itself.
This is only true if by “leave the topic” you mean kill the whole tab and then open a new one to get back to Qt3. If you leave the topic but stay within Discourse (by hitting the home button, clicking through to one of the Suggested Topics at the bottom, going to the Unread view or one of the categories, etc.), the nag banner will follow you through the whole rest of that session. I know through testing that I can stash the draft and clear the notification by starting and cancelling a reply to a different topic, but that sort of unintuitive workaround shouldn’t be necessary.
Oh, I see what you mean. Yeah that’s a good point – we should offer a “hide” there if people really want to come back to it way later on a different device.
So, yeah, I guess that is our fundamental difference. You say people shouldn’t be “forced to push a button to make something go away like a hamster requesting food pellets.” I say give me the option to mark threads and forums read or unread when I want to.
You say a bunch of stuff on how you decide for me what I’m interested in as if that is a good thing. I say I don’t want you to decide for me what I’m interested in - I just want you to keep it simple and let me decide which forums and threads I want to mark read and unread. I can handle it, really, I have for decades! ;)
So very fundamental difference and we’re not gonna agree. Which is OK.
As stated multiple times above, you can – just set every category to “tracking” state. Then you’ll have to dismiss all new posts every time you visit (or they’ll keep piling up).
If you are unable or unwilling to do that, well, I dunno what to tell ya.
Man, I wish I could push a button to make things go away. Instead I have to click on the thread, then click the mute button. And on mobile, that button is at the bottom.
Just saying!
The mute button is wonderful overall, though I probably overmute threads, which is wasted effort thanks to the lack of direct muting from the thread list.
Mute is pretty strong – why not just set it back to “normal”? Mute suppresses all notifications and erases the topic from your topic list views.
Mute is wishing topics into a cornfield.
Normal isn’t the default state, though. The default state is one where Discourse changes you to watching if you spend time in a topic. Once you change a muted topic back to normal, you’ll not enter the same default state where Discourse escalates topics on your behalf. This drives me nuts.
[quote=“wumpus, post:812, topic:119996, full:true”]
Mute is pretty strong[/quote]
Yes, it’s too strong.
I don’t want to ever see the thread pop up in Latest. It’s visual noise I want to obliterate. However, I don’t like that it disables notifications since I can’t mute without wondering if someone is trying to ask me a question or continue a conversation.
I’ve suggested a hush button to hide a topic from the Latest list for two weeks. Many threads get bumped for half a day and then go back to sleep for a few years. But the availability of a mute button causes me to obsessively hide threads.
How would that work? So you set it to normal, and after 4 minutes of reading (or if you post in the topic again), it gets set back to tracking? That’d be hellaciously annoying, since it would be overriding your manually set preference … over and over.
My point was that if you expect the same behavior when you set it to normal as you get before you ever change it – well, you aren’t going to get that because Normal is not the default. I’ve done this several times and regret that I no longer get the default behavior. I never would have muted the threads had I known that.
Case: I mute a league topic because I don’t know/play the game. Later I look for something I might want to play, remember and unmute the topic - setting it to normal - thinking it will return to the general pool. I read it here and there and then get interested and read it a lot. It never converts to watched again without manual intervention.
As a departure from the default behavior, that is confusing to me. I did exactly this with several P&R topics and it confused me for a few days when I assumed that returning it to normal would again allow it to to automatically escalate to Watched based on my behavior.
Correct, once you’ve manually set a notification level on a topic, we never override it. The act of manually manipulating a notification level says “I want this, don’t change it behind my back”.
I don’t think I can ever recall any topics on meta about this in the last 3 years, either…
Welp… I’m not asking you to stop the train and fix it, just pointing out that it is a user unfriendly inconsistency, since Normal implies the default level (because you are erroneously shown the Normal label when in default mode).
Maybe no one realises it’s happening? I’ve muted/unmuted a bunch of threads before, and ice definitely had issues with some threads not auto tracking…I need her connected the two before!
Plus, I doubt every other forum had their own gripe topic piped directly to the Discourse boss like our privileged one. Whining on meta is a massive effort, not something most normal people will be bothered to do .
What you need are stats! Track how many people spend how many minutes in unmuted threads!
How do I dismiss new posts in a topic such that they aren’t bolded any longer? I tried the keys in the Keyboard Shortcuts and that doesn’t do anything.
And to try to articulate my concerns, you just don’t see huge threads in “standard” forums like this one where people talk about how the forum software does things “on your behalf” that they don’t want and other confusing behaviors.
I’m not expecting to change your mind, BTW, you’ve made a big personal investment in switching to this software. Just feedback fwiw.
What you’ll be dismissing …
… is the unread count:
The area circled in pink is the number of unread posts in that topic, which is what appears when you “track” a topic or category.
Bold / unbold has a diferent meaning (thanks to the custom CSS in effect here), to get that you actually need to read to the bottom of the topic.
Not quite. Normal is the default state, not behaviour. And if you set the options the right way, you can have that state changed to tracked a second after entering a thread for the first time. The default behaviour is that “Discourse will change the state of a topic you read for long enough to tracked, unless you have yourself overridden it to a specific topic state”.
It’s always consistent about that principle and I would be really annoyed if Discourse went and changed topic state i had set manually.
If you don’t care about a topic enough to manually set its state and later change your mind, it’s no big deal to then set the new desired state yourself. And that’s consistent with the rule of respecting the user’s choice.
Wendelius