Users xan2622 and emilio find the “Tracked” option in the sidebar confusing and largely useless, as it doesn’t behave as expected — it doesn’t show unread indicators, doesn’t filter only tracked topics, and displays unrelated “Top” content. mcwumbly confirms that “Tracked” was intended to aggregate topics from tracked or watched categories/tags, but became misaligned with the sidebar’s redesign that allowed adding items without tracking them. The team plans to remove “Tracked” entirely, as it no longer serves its original purpose — and mcwumbly notes it has already been removed from the sidebar via GitHub PR #19122. Future iterations may reintroduce aggregated topic lists in a redesigned form.
I second @emilio’s feeling/opinion about “Tracked” (the one that is located on the left sidebar, in “Community”).
I have expected that Tracked would:
show a small blue dot that would inform me that, among the threads that I track, one (or several of them) has been updated with a new comment. Atm, it doesn’t show anything, no “blue dot” notification.
lead me to a page with “Unread”: new posts that I haven’t read yet, within the threads that I am tracking.
lead me to the same page with “Latest”: a list of all my tracked threads, shown in chronological order (the most recently updated ones being placed at the top).
But instead, currently, Tracked:
leads me to “Latest” : You’re all caught up! Ready to start a new conversation? which link I don’t feel like using here because I prefer to go to the right forum category before clicking on the “New Topic” button.
allows me to click on “Top” which displays topics that I have never tracked.
atm, Tracked feels pretty useless.
Are there plans to change the behaviour of “Tracked” ?
It’s intent was to show you an aggregate of topics from all the categories and tags you’ve expressed interest in. It does this by showing topics from categories and tags you’re tracking or watching. In an earlier iteration of the sidebar you had to track or watch a tag or category in order to add it to your sidebar. Then we shifted gears and decided to allow you to add things to your sidebar without having to track them. As a side effect, that “tracked” aggregator became more decoupled from the design itself.
The idea of having the ability to have links directly to aggregate topic lists is something we will likely revisit in a completely different way in the future.