Ability to mark any post as unread

貢献 特徴
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.

「いいね！」 3
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.

「いいね！」 2
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

「いいね！」 3
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).

「いいね！」 3
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.

「いいね！」 3
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.

「いいね！」 4
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

「いいね！」 7
13

具体的な方法を詳しく教えていただけますか？
リンク先のトピックは存在しないか、アクセスできません。

「いいね！」 1
14

その機能がテーマコンポーネントではなく、標準機能になったためだと思います。

トピックの下部にある「トピックの操作」を開くと、そこにオプションが表示されているはずです。

defer topic
defer topic1080×1287 121 KB

「いいね！」 3
15

それは有効にする必要がある設定ですか？
ここにも、discuss.gradle.org にも表示されていません。

「いいね！」 1
16

Discourse Meta - The Official Support Forum for Discourse のプロフィール設定で、まずこれを有効にする必要があります。また、/admin/site_settings/category/all_results?filter=defer のサイト設定を使用して、新規ユーザーに対してデフォルトで有効にすることもできます。

「いいね！」 4
17

あ、ありがとう。
それが必要な機能だったり、切り替え可能なものだったとは思いもしませんでした。
もし不要なら、ブックマークボタンなどと同様に、そのボタンを押さなければよいだけです。

「いいね！」 1
18

この設定の背景にある考え方は、特にデスクトップ環境においてトピックの下部に不要な要素が増えるのを防ぐことです。また、この機能は「インボックスゼロ」ワークフローに精通したユーザーにのみ有用であり、ブックマークや同じ領域にある他のボタンを利用するユーザーに比べると、その数は少ないと見込まれています。

「いいね！」 2
19

「インボックスゼロ」だけに役立つとは限りません。
私はどちらかといえば「インボックス 10,000」派ですが、それでもトピックを未読に戻したいです。
この機能がないことにいつも残念に思い、Discourse にそんな基本的な機能がないことを嘆いていました。
報告しようと思い立ったところ、実はその機能は最初から存在していたことがわかりました。ただ、非常にうまく隠されていたのです。 :slight_smile:

「いいね！」 2
20

気になりますね、ブックマークのリマインダーは使っていますか？