The discussion revolves around the removal of the grey bubble for unread posts in topics that were read before the last visit, a feature previously used to distinguish between older and newer unread content. seanblue notes that the grey bubble, which helped identify posts made before the last visit, is no longer appearing and is now replaced by a blue bubble for all unread posts. tshenry explains this was an intentional change made alongside the new last visit indicator, referencing a GitHub commit. seanblue expresses that the grey bubble was still useful for tracking conversations since the last read, while codinghorror agrees but acknowledges the change reflects a majority preference for simplification.
Before, unread posts in a topic you were tracking were split into two groups: A grey bubble for unread posts that were made before the last time you visited the topic; and a blue bubble for unread posts that were made after the last time you visited the topic. (I’m using the built in dark theme.) This has stopped working recently, and now everything shows up in the blue bubble. I think it worked this way at least on the Latest and Unread tabs. I don’t remember if it showed up elsewhere.
This should be pretty easy to reproduce. Just find a topic with a lot of posts. Read through a handful of posts and then mark the topic as tracking. Then go to Latest or Unread and you’ll see the blue bubble instead of the expected grey bubble.
For what it’s worth, I think the grey bubble would still be valuable even after this new feature was added. If I was really behind on a topic and read part of it before taking a break, it was nice to be able to see at a glance how much conversation there’d been since I was last catching up. Certainly not the end of the world to lose the feature, but I’ll still miss it.
I actually agree with you, but most other people didn’t, so we are in the minority. I figured it’s better to go with majority rule on this one, especially if it is in the direction of making things simpler.