There’s one piece of logic I don’t think we cover yet:
“this is a topic” was created in 2015
I join the forum in 2016. I track no categories, but I’m always on the lookout for topics, i.e. topics that are completely new to me.
“this is a topic” receives replies.
the only way for me to spot this topic is to notice it as unopened in Latest.
In my opinion, the logic should be:
If a topic is completely unread and receives new replies, it should show up as for me, so long as it also matches my Consider topics new when preference.
I actually implemented this in a plugin, but I think the concern was that making that change in core could potentially cause a lot of confusion for existing users, especially those that have “consider topics as new when I haven’t viewed them yet” as their setting.
You mean, not expecting a topic to be when it is actually many years old?
Yeah it can be a mild shock, but I don’t see how missing the topic altogether is a better trade off. There are additional UI hints we could throw in if we get a lot of reactions to this.
I really don’t know, this is very complicated and full of compromise dragons.
There is one edge case that kind of makes sense to handle though.
IF you have “Consider topics new when I haven’t viewed them yet”
AND an old topic you never saw gets a reply
AND the topic was created PRIOR to the time you created an account
THEN consider topic new
This is rather edge casey, but makes complete sense.
I am less easy about the default of “Consider topics new when created in the last 2 days”
We are very explicit about the copy there, so we would basically be lying and people who simply “ignore” to get rid of new stuff will get really really annoyed.