Our community has been reporting that, after we updated to Discourse 3.0 about ~2 months ago, their bookmarks sometimes mysteriously disappear. I’ve narrowed down the complaints to users primarily using /bookmarks
(and not /my/activity/bookmarks
) — there’s a related usability issue there between the two, but I’ll come later to that.
Right now I’m mostly confused about what is the expected behavior of /bookmarks
as they don’t have all the users bookmark (as listed in /my/activity/bookmarks
). Why so? For my own account, the difference is almost 1/3 bookmarks missing: shouldn’t those two sections essentially be listing the exact same amount of bookmarks/topics?
I thought perhaps /bookmarks
only supported bookmarked posts (and not topics), but that doesn’t seem to be the case: our users consistently bookmark a post/topic, see it fine showing under /bookmarks
for a few hours or days, and then it just… disappears? If they delete the bookmark, bookmark it again, it appears for a while, and later disappears yet again. To be clear, the bookmarks always show fine under /my/activity/bookmarks
, so the bookmark itself exists — but for some reason doesn’t show under /bookmarks
after a while. There must be a difference between the contents of the two sections but I don’t see it — what am I missing?
Now, the reason this is particularly annoying for our users is that they find the /my/activity/bookmarks
unusable for their main use case which is to find which of their bookmarked topics have updates (within a particular category, or just on the whole forum).
I can see a lot of nice functionality on the interface /my/activity/bookmarks
but it still doesn’t do their primary use: being able to sort by last activity while at the same time seeing which topics have updates (number of unread). Would be great if sorting would work there too and if the number of unread posts in each topic would show, but I’m not sure how functionality to filter the bookmarks by category would work under /my/activity/bookmarks
, so perhaps it’s justifiable that there’s /bookmarks
too.
Anyhow, perhaps these are two separate issues here (maybe a bug (?) and a UX issue), but they are related: I have been pushing the community to avoid the “disappearing bookmarks” by using the /my/activity/bookmarks
instead, but for what they are using it for, it really doesn’t work. Perhaps if we understand the “disappearing” bookmarks we can find a workaround — so: why don’t all bookmarks show under /bookmarks
?