There are other topics on the implied time bomb here, but I am having trouble finding them because they relate to really generic concepts. We just ran into this with an enterprise customer and a specific user. It is a little insane that new (since I joined) and returning (since my last visit) dates are not capped.
In other words, imagine the user who is active on a site for five years, then suddenly changes their user preference for New from its default of “topics created in the last two days” to “consider topics new if I have not visited them.” After five years there could be thousands, possibly tens of thousands of topics they have not visited! Same logic applies to “created since I was here last” if your last visit happened to be a year ago…
So @sam is adding the following logic:
- Use john date unless join date was more than (x) days ago, then use (x) days ago
- Use last visited date unless last visit date was more than (x) days ago, then use (x) days ago
(Your join date was already an effective cap here, since clearly topics created before you joined the site cannot be considered “new” to you, can they?)
Where (x) days ago is a site setting we will add, defaulting to 60 days as a fail safe. On low volume sites this might make sense to be a year, even.
I am surprised it took us this long for a user to fall into the pit of despair we created with these settings, from the user’s perspective this starts to be a dumb behavior after just a few weeks on a busy site.. do you really want 1,426 topics to be considered new to you??