Ability to mark any post as unread

Contribuisci Funzionalità
1

Continuing the discussion from How Coinbase Uses Discourse to Educate Customers and Improve SEO:

The interviewee of the referenced blog article states the following dislike:

If a post on a topic can be “unread”, why can’t I mark it unread again after reading it?

and I’d like to talk a bit about that and the workflow that is not possible at the moment.

Concept

In email clients, you can mark any email as “unread”, even in a longer discussion or thread, and return to it later. Most clients allow you to filter or navigate unread emails only, so this workflow is a breeze for when you decide you need to work on something again later, such as prepare a reply.

The same holds true for RSS readers, where you find a post that deserves more attention than what you give currently and you want to save it for later.

In Discourse, however, the concept of marking specific posts as unread is not a thing and unread posts can only occur at the end of a thread that you didn’t scroll into the view yet. Additionally, the algorithm that chooses to automatically mark posts as read can be inaccurate depending on your reading habits (i.e. whether you use mouse scrolling or j/k keys).

Why Not Bookmarks?

I understand that bookmarks are a possible workaround for this situation. But “bookmarks” semantically mean something different in most situations because I only intend to (re-)read the “unread” posts once and not save it for recurring occasions. Thus, one-time bookmarks and long-term bookmarks would get mixed and you’ll have to remember to unbookmark each “unread” post when you access it. They would also not get displayed in the “Unread” front page tab.

Required Changes for Discourse

  • The unread indicator (currently blue dot next to relative post timestamp) needs to be toggleable, which likely requires repositioning and redesign. Also with a keyboard shortcut, suggesting m (already used for topic track state).
  • There needs to be a way to traverse between unread posts within a thread, up and down.

It’s not high priority for me, but it deserves to be discussed imo.

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Keep posts unread
Possible "take me back to where I was" button on progress bar
2

A much higher priority for us is to have a cleaner way of dealing with “reading holes” eg: topics where you read post 1-10, 50 but did not read 11-49. If what you are describing would likely create reading holes and not behave in a very intuitive way cause you could only do it effectively for the last post in a topic.

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Possible "take me back to where I was" button on progress bar
3

Yes, it would (or rather should) be possible to create these “reading holes” that way.

My second suggested change is supposed to hint at the reading holes issue. I suppose there are generally two ways to solve this:

  1. Hide read posts.
  2. Do not hide read posts and instead provide buttons/key binds to traverse to next or previous unread post.

I can not evaluate how gray and blue unread counters are relevant here, because I don’t clearly understand how they work at this moment, however.

4

I like it and asked before

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5

yeah I use Discourse as a teacher and there are topics I need to come back to in like 4 months (Bookmark) and there are topics I need to remember to answer in a few days (mark as undread).

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6

Agreed! I need a feature like this. Any workaround with a plug-in?

7

Any progress on this? Is it on the roadmap?

8

It is not on any roadmap I am aware of. Use bookmarks.

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9

Assuming that the Discourse Calendar plugin will also work in PMs, perhaps you can work around it by creating a calendar PM to yourself and adding replies with links to posts you want to come back to at a certain point in time?

10

That sounds awfully complex when we already have several means to track notable threads.

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11

Absolutely. It was just an idea for those who are not happy with existing functionality.

12

A theme component can now allow you to do this per:

https://meta.discourse.org/t/defer-topic-button-mark-topic-unread/110951

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13

Puoi per favore spiegare meglio come farlo?
L’argomento collegato non esiste o non è accessibile.

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14

Penso che sia perché quella funzione è ora standard, invece di essere in un componente del tema.

Se apri ‘Controlli argomento’ in fondo a un argomento, dovresti vedere l’opzione lì:

defer topic
defer topic1080×1287 121 KB

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15

È qualcosa che deve essere abilitato?
Non lo vedo né qui, né su discuss.gradle.org.

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16

Devi prima abilitarlo nelle impostazioni del tuo profilo su Discourse Meta - The Official Support Forum for Discourse. Può anche essere abilitato di default per i nuovi utenti utilizzando l’impostazione del sito in /admin/site_settings/category/all_results?filter=defer

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17

Ah, grazie.
Non mi aspettavo che fosse qualcosa di cui hai bisogno o che puoi attivare/disattivare.
Se non lo vuoi, puoi semplicemente evitare di premere il pulsante, proprio come per il pulsante dei segnalibri e così via.

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18

La motivazione originale alla base di queste impostazioni è che aggiungono disordine nella parte inferiore dell’argomento, specialmente su desktop. La funzionalità è utile solo per gli adepti del flusso di lavoro “inbox zero”, che si prevede siano una minoranza rispetto alla popolazione che utilizza i segnalibri e gli altri pulsanti nella stessa area.

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19

Non sono d’accordo sul fatto che sia utile solo per “inbox zero”. Io sono più del tipo “inbox 10.000” e vorrei comunque poter segnare gli argomenti come non letti. Mi è mancata davvero questa funzionalità e ho sempre lamentato che Discourse non avesse una funzione così basilare. Finché non ho deciso di segnalarla e ora ho scoperto che la funzionalità è sempre stata lì, solo molto ben nascosta. :slight_smile:

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Curioso, usi i promemoria dei segnalibri?