Cannot change watching status on mobile while in the middle of topic

Contribute Feature
17

At my request, this topic was reopened and recategorized as a feature. I felt it was easier than creating a new topic for the same conversation.

Unfortunately, this does not really work all that well as a workaround. The problem with this workaround is that Mark unread only does so for the last post. Any previous post that is still marked as read. Let me give an example of when this has been a problem.

A community I participate in often runs book clubs with weekly assignments, using a new topic for each week. If I get behind in the reading, I still want to track or watch each week’s topic so I don’t lose track of them. Let’s say I catch up in the book club after a few weeks and I’m now ready to read one of the topics. Since I only just finished the week’s reading, I really want to read the topic from start to end. But if there are 15 posts, it’s possible that 10 of them are already marked as read from when I set the topic to tracking/watching. Obviously I can scroll up to the top manually, but if I only have time to read the first 3 posts, it won’t remember that I’m up to post 4 since it still thinks I’m up to post 11.

I think there are some options to alleviate this problem besides reverting the previous changes.

  1. Mark unread could also reset/clear the latest post read, effectively marking the entire topic as unread, not just the last post.
  2. Mark unread could be added as an option in the context menu for individual posts, giving users the ability to choose how far back in the topic they want to mark as unread. For my example above, this would allow me to mark the first post as unread, effectively making the entire topic unread.
  3. Give the option to change the watching status without opening a topic. This might be a bit tight on mobile, but perhaps there’s enough room for a ... context menu button next to each topic for additional options. (Honestly, on the New topics page I’ve wanted that for dismissing individual topics instead of all new topics anyway, so I think this could be generally useful.)

Hopefully at least one of these options can solve this problem.