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
What’s the difference between reading to the bottom of the topic and having no more blue/unread posts in a topic?
Clay is saying that Discourse effectively has five states: mute, normal, tracking, watching and default. And that normal and default present themselves as being the same thing to the user, and that the user can never go back to default. Once default has been switched away from, you can never go back to it. Selecting ‘normal’ is not the same as selecting ‘default’.
He cared enough to change the topic’s state twice! I would say it’s not very consistent and not very respectful to not allow the user to go back to the hidden default state :)
Whether your actual, real read position is at the bottom of the topic or not. Clearing unread is not the same as actually reading, and we don’t award reading stats credit or (obvously) increment reading seconds time on the posts for it.
Man there are a lot of lurkers out there.
reading stats credit? so you’re tracking what is being read by who and for how long?
That is correct. Reading is fundamental.
For the love of all that is holy, please do not do this. Or if you do, at least make it admin and user configurable.
The whole damn internet is turning into disconnected bubbles of information as ‘intelligent’ software makes decisions for people about what it thinks they want to see, as evidenced by the Facebook/US election coverage debacle. It’s a terrible, terrible direction I hope you don’t get suckered into following for the sake of mimicing other software trends.
If your modern forum software is truly designed to encourage conversation, that goal won’t be served by deciding for participants what they may be interested in. The software already has user available tools for that (mute), so leave it at that.
I think that is the difference. This feels more like it is focused on the forum owners/mods than it is on the readers.
In terms of getting to the end of the topic as a way to do something - I have no idea how to get to end of the topic. Hitting END or CTRL-END doesn’t do it. It just scrolls and scrolls. On most other forum software, it simply shows what page you’re on, and you can hit a button to go to whatever page you want or click on “Last” to get to the last post.
Here’s my heartburn - every thing I mention as something I am used to doing and want to do when I read a forum is thrown back in my face with pejorative terms - the behavior of other more standard forums is not different, it’s “Bad” and wrong. As the post above me states - a lot of us do NOT want the software making our decisions for us.
I’m not a fan of all the tracking done for what’s supposed to be a community forum – it makes me feel like a marketing opportunity waiting to happen.
Yes, it does. Or you can click on the bottom date on the timeline in the right gutter.
From the topic list, you can also enter a topic at the bottom by clicking on the post count, or the last post date.
If there was a magic wand I could wave to make this behave exactly like vbulletin for you, I would, but that is like trying to merge basketball and baseball. Different games; both sportsball.
Um - no it doesn’t. I’m looking at the Hardware and Technical stuff topics home - list of threads. I hit End. It goes down one page. It does not go to the end of the topic. I hit Ctrl-End. Same behavior. I also don’t see anything else that I can click on, on the Topic threads lists, that takes me to the bottom of the topic and a “dismiss all” button.
Using Windows 10 and latest version of Chrome.
Unrelated thing, presented as a reproduction case to appease @wumpus
You are referring to the topic list? There is no concept of the end of the list of topics. If you wish to dismiss, visit Unread or New tabs and do it from there.
@pod suggestion, skip step 8.
Dismiss button (while in Unread) not working in Chrome or Mobile Chrome for me today.
Oh yeah that was an actual bug. Let me deploy latest here. Sorry about that.
Working now. Hooray!
