So Discourse give you the awesome tool to show Favorites/bookmark topics on nav menu alongside latest etc. It’s a cool feature for those who like to find specifics topics.
You can’t do that, once the topic or a specific reply has been bookmarked the button at the topic level changes to ‘clear bookmarks’. The topic-level control to bookmark is gone.
So a topic-level bookmark can’t overwrite a post-level bookmark, if a specific post is bookmarked the post and latest reading position are the two links within the bookmark. If the topic is bookmarked then it’s the topic root / and the latest reading position.
I bookmarked your earlier reply, so my bookmark link goes to /4 and my topic link goes to /6 because it’s my latest read position.
But… topics and posts are such different concepts if you stop to thinking about it.
If I bookmarked a topic to read later/any day and it has 50 replies, I’ll only be able to bookmark my location while I’m reading if I scroll to the bottom and then clean my bookmarks. So it should be the way around… if I’m bookmarking a post in a topic that was already bookmarked, it should override it.
Your progress is still being tracked and remembered like usual.
You can still bookmark any post in the topic as you scroll down too. The only reason you need the control at the bottom at all is to clear your bookmarks for the topic.
Get back to topic lists/latest, enter the topic again. Bookmark any post in this topic that you previously marked as favorite. Try to reach the post you have marked using this icon.
You’ll get redirect to first post instead until you clean all your bookmark… until that you won’t be able to track your location.
Your assertion is that something is being lost, or overwritten, but as you can see from /my/activity/bookmarksmultiple bookmarks in the same topic are preserved.
Regardless of the order they’re bookmarked in, the icon on /bookmarks goes to the lowest numbered bookmarked post within the topic (I’ve tested and confirmed this)
Your criticism of /bookmarks stems from not understanding the priority for the icon. You aren’t limited to a single bookmark per-topic:
If the topic and subsequent posts have been bookmarked, then the icon on that page goes to the topic
If multiple replies have been bookmarked, then the lowest-numbered reply within the topic to be bookmarked becomes the destination
The bookmark icon at the bottom of the topic being swapped to ‘clear bookmarks’ isn’t entirely helpful, because if you bookmark a topic and then a post within said topic there’s no obvious UI to remove the bookmark from the topic, while leaving the post bookmark intact. For now you need to navigate to the above link and remove it from there.
I asked you if you were expecting /bookmarks to show all bookmarks within a topic as discrete rows, because in that view it only shows the topic title, unlike /my/activity/bookmarks. If /bookmarks were to behave in that way, how would a user differentiate visually between two bookmarks within the same topic without having to check the reply ID it directs to. Here’s a mockup:
How would I be able to tell from title alone which of those takes me to the topic, and which takes me to a post?
My last point related to whether it would be possible to indicate the position of all bookmarks along the topic progress bar. In particularly large topics it would be invaluable to jump between them, otherwise users would be forced to jump back to /my/activity/bookmarks periodically to find the next link.
I had this concept thought before for recommended posts feature. Sometimes a topic has replies from members that adds valuable information to the first post/OP.
A box shows up when you put your mouse (hover) above the bar.