Introducing the unified new view for the topic list

News and Events Announcements
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Following on from The "new new" has been enabled on Meta , we are now introducing an upcoming change to make the unified new view the default for the topic list on all Discourse sites.

What is unified new?

This change modifies the New tab on the topic list to have subtabs for Topics (topics that are new to the user), Replies (unread topics), and All (a combination of the two):

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What is unified new replacing?

The old default is to have a separate /new and /unread route with associated top menu navigation items, which was generally a bit trickier to explain for members who are new to Discourse:

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:gear: Turning on unified new in your community

To turn this on, head to the Upcoming changes page in your admin area (/admin/config/upcoming-changes) and find the Enable unified new item. Update the Enabled for… field to opt your site in to this new design:

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I will never understand New vs Unread vs Unseen vs … wait, isn’t there another thing called Hot ?

:wink:  

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And now you don’t need to anymore! :laughing:

Or at least, a bit less :wink:

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I don’t have the “Enable unified new” option. I wanted to enable it but couldn’t find it. I’m always ready to enable and test updates :slight_smile:

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Are you on the latest version?

:hugs:

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Looks like you last updated your forum about 2 weeks ago. The Discourse team merges new stuff often several times a day, so often you only use the truly latest version for a short time after updating.

The smiley telling you that you are up to date doesn’t reference each single commit. Then it would be unhappy all the time. It checks the version number telling you to update each time that is increased. Security updates are usually merged right before that happens. It’s the time where you should update to get them and sort of a reminder to update once a month even if there were none.

But if you want to test a brand new announced feature, you often need to update - even though the smiley is happy - because the version number hasn’t changed yet.

These are all the commits that were merged since you updated your forum Changelog | Discourse releases | d55ea4fd0f → latest
The upcoming change for unified new view is quite at the top of that list, so it’s brand new.

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Never say never! There are various settings that can change this by site or account, but the defaults are:

  • New: a topic that was created within the past 2 days that you haven’t opened yet
  • Unread: topics you’ve already read that have new replies
  • Unseen: topics you’ve never read at any point (hidden by default, a bit of a niche case)

The hope with the combined new is that the labels topics/replies are a little more intuitive than figuring out the difference between new/unread

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I think “new” are not necessarily topics from the past 2 days. There is a user preference where you can configure which topics appear in new

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Similarly, unread only shows topics you are tracking or watching that have new replies (there is a preference for automatically tracking topics after some time of reading; there is also one for tracking/watching on reply, and when creating the topic, you can track/watch all topics with a tag or in a category, and you can manually edit the topic tracking status of each topic).

So I get why it’s complicated. Especially the fact that not all new replies are in unread.

I think it also helped that this was explained on the pages of /new and /unread. Since those aren’t hidden for new users when they are empty, this used to be a great place to learn how these lists work.

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It just felt like a lot of text to show all the time to users just because they have an empty list, regardless of whether a user account was 1 day old or 10 years old…this is what we show now:

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But there is probably a middle ground, like maybe we could show more info if the user account isn’t very old, or we could add more info in a tooltip? @awesomerobot WDYT?

Overall we still have to do more work on user tips/new user education, hopefully at some point we can get to this.

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I think your post would better fit into the topic I quoted than into this topic.

Since /new and /unread are hidden from the navigation if they are empty I never felt like seeing those all the time.