How does "publish read state" work?

[carlokok]

I saw a commit for " Publish read state on group messages" (FEATURE: Publish read state on group messages. (Originally introduced in #7989) by romanrizzi · Pull Request #8025 · discourse/discourse · GitHub); can someone explain what this does?

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

We are still working on the feature, it essentially allows you to keep track of which messages have been read by a group you belong to (opt in)

We are still refining, will make a proper announcement once done

[downey (Michael Downey)]

Was this ever announced or explained anywhere? I still am not confident in how it works, but I would like to be.

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

Hmmmm I am not sure if we ever made an #feature:announcements topic about this, we should @Roman did we have any documentation about the feature on meta.

[Roman (Roman Rizzi)]

Done here:

Publish group read state

When in a group, knowing if another user reads a message can be quite useful. A couple of months ago we added the experimental “Publish read state” feature, which after a lot of tweaks is now ready to be safely used. As you may have noticed, this shows who read which post. It adds a new icon and the reader’s count just before the likes: [Screen Shot 2020-02-27 at 15.03.02] If you click the icon, you can also see the reader’s avatars (it works the same way that likes). You will only count as a…