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

Feature
1

You used to be able to change watching status from the timeline view on mobile, but that is no longer possible. As far as I can tell, there’s now no way to change watching status without going to the bottom of the topic, and therefore marking the whole topic as read.

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7

Any thoughts on this issue?

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8

I don’t remember we could do it from the timeline in mobile view, but this is not the kind of thing I remember.

But indeed, changing the watching status from the timeline on mobile seems right.

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14

Thanks for your patience while we were looking into this — we made an intentional change to the topic timeline on mobile to save space and reduce visual overwhelm that can negatively impact navigation and the user experience as a whole. We won’t be reverting that change at this time.

Our suggested workaround is to use the Mark unread button to return the topic to unread status, if you need to make sure it stays unread after changing the notification level. If you don’t see that button yet, you can update the Enable mark topics as unread setting in your interface preferences.

I understand this isn’t the news you wanted to hear. If you’d like to share more feedback with us, please open a Feature topic to explain your use case in more detail — this may help uncover an existing solution or help us plan future improvements.

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15

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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.

18

Whoa! This is quite a regression for us.

We want people to visit topics via their mobiles at an in person event via QR codes on each table and tick ‘Watching’ if they want to remain connected to the ongoing discussion.

This is not going to work with the current minimal mobile UI - that scroll to the bottom on mobile makes this unfeasible in most cases.

My thoughts for workarounds:

  1. Keep the Topics super short / locked down for the time of the interaction
  2. Lower default_other_auto_track_topics_after_msecs to immediate for the event
    • this will likely result in a lot of false hits for other users or if they browse though
    • unfortunately, this isn’t per category!
  3. Run a script at the end of the day to force tracking/watching as appropriate for those who have visited (or maybe liked) the Topic

Sorry @seanblue - these won’t help your use case.
The simplest workaround for you is to use a bigger device!