My site lists “Categories”, “Latest”, and “Unseen” across the top of the page when I click on “Topics” in the sidebar. If I click on “Unseen”, a page appears that says nothing to see here. But when I enter “in:unseen” into the search box, the search function finds many topics! Why the difference?
Hey!
That’s expected behavior: search box gives you unseen at the post level, while /unseen checks it at the topic level.
Or more explicitely: They’re measuring different things, despite the shared name.
Unseen page = it shows topics that have new posts after the point you’d read up to.
in:unseen search term = it finds individual posts we have no record of you having read.
Which sounds the same but they easily diverge. For example: if you jump to the end of a topic, or use “Dismiss”, the topic counts as fully read even though most posts in it were never displayed to you. So the Unseen page is empty (no topic has anything after your last-read point) while search still finds plenty of individual posts you haven’t read.