this is correct, it’s based on the user preference on /my/preferences/tracking — “Consider topics new when” (defaults to “last 2 days”)… making it configurable on that page directly could be a nice addition
Understandable, but it doesn’t… it’s “topics created within the last 2 days with most recent activity first” — so not a chronological list, active topics are prioritized over less active topics, which is our default assumption for sorting topic lists
Unfortunately tracked doesn’t work because tracking is a name for a specific concept we already use, so it wouldn’t be accurate… “unread” = “new posts in topics I’m watching or tracking”
There’s maybe too much complication here for a simple naming convention to work for everyone… with “latest” “new” and “unread” we had feedback that people new to Discourse didn’t really know which was which… technically if it’s new to me I haven’t read it, right? so aren’t “new” and “unread” synonyms for the same thing? there’s also some overlap with “latest” and “new” — if something is “new”, isn’t often also the “latest”? (and it’s true, sometimes it is)
So the thought with the new naming is that eliminating “unread” and using “new topics” and “new replies” more clearly distinguishes the concepts… “new replies” doesn’t have the same ambiguity of “unread” and “new topics” specifies “topics” where “new” on its own did not.
Naming convention aside, it seems that the primary complaint about the change is that at the top level the count is now combined and it takes an extra click to both see the counts and get to a specific list.
Could something like this improve the situation?
