Introducing the unified new view for the topic list

News and Events Announcements

AI-generated summary

martin announces the rollout of the “unified new” view for Discourse topic lists, replacing the separate /new and /unread routes with a single tab featuring subtabs for Topics (newly created topics), Replies (unread topics), and All (combined). This change aims to simplify navigation for new users by removing the distinction between “New” and “Unread” states.

However, the announcement sparked significant debate regarding the clarity of these categories. sren-1 and mbauman expressed confusion over the definitions, noting that the new system intermingles global state (new topics by creation date) with individual tracking states (watched topics with unread posts). mbauman argues that this removes visibility into tracked topics, which they consider more important than globally new topics, and suggests that “Unread” should be renamed to “Tracked Replies” for clarity. Moin and awesomerobot clarified the technical distinctions, explaining that “New” is configurable by user preference and “Unread” only shows tracked topics, while Moin noted that the previous separate pages served as helpful onboarding tools for new users.

Technical issues were also raised. Heliosurge reported a UI inconsistency where the “New All” tab link opened the wrong tab, prompting martin to promise a fix. martin further discussed sorting logic, confirming that the “All” list prioritizes the current user’s unread topics at the top, a behavior sam supported as helpful for specific user groups. martin linked to pull requests addressing UI fixes.

Community feedback remains mixed. Damian_Boon confirmed the change only affects /new, not /latest. mbauman noted their community opted out due to confusion, citing similar past failures. petr0 reported that heavy users dislike the feature, specifically citing the difficulty of accessing subscribed topics with new replies and the disruption of the “new posts” section at the bottom of topics, which now shows globally new topics rather than replies to followed threads, forcing users to backtrack to the main page.

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Following on from The "new new" has been enabled on Meta , we are now introducing an upcoming change to make the unified new view the default for the topic list on all Discourse sites.

What is unified new?

This change modifies the New tab on the topic list to have subtabs for Topics (topics that are new to the user), Replies (unread topics), and All (a combination of the two):

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What is unified new replacing?

The old default is to have a separate /new and /unread route with associated top menu navigation items, which was generally a bit trickier to explain for members who are new to Discourse:

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:gear: Turning on unified new in your community

To turn this on, head to the Upcoming changes page in your admin area (/admin/config/upcoming-changes) and find the Enable unified new item. Update the Enabled for… field to opt your site in to this new design:

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New Topics is showing all Topics New & unread
Can Unified New dismiss topics after a user scrolls past them?
Current Projects - June 2026
Make Unified View optional (permanently)
Change in tooltip of 'New' tab
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I will never understand New vs Unread vs Unseen vs … wait, isn’t there another thing called Hot ?

:wink:  

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And now you don’t need to anymore! :laughing:

Or at least, a bit less :wink:

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I don’t have the “Enable unified new” option. I wanted to enable it but couldn’t find it. I’m always ready to enable and test updates :slight_smile:

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Are you on the latest version?

:hugs:

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Looks like you last updated your forum about 2 weeks ago. The Discourse team merges new stuff often several times a day, so often you only use the truly latest version for a short time after updating.

The smiley telling you that you are up to date doesn’t reference each single commit. Then it would be unhappy all the time. It checks the version number telling you to update each time that is increased. Security updates are usually merged right before that happens. It’s the time where you should update to get them and sort of a reminder to update once a month even if there were none.

But if you want to test a brand new announced feature, you often need to update - even though the smiley is happy - because the version number hasn’t changed yet.

These are all the commits that were merged since you updated your forum Changelog | Discourse releases | d55ea4fd0f → latest
The upcoming change for unified new view is quite at the top of that list, so it’s brand new.

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Localization bug in recurring events
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Never say never! There are various settings that can change this by site or account, but the defaults are:

  • New: a topic that was created within the past 2 days that you haven’t opened yet
  • Unread: topics you’ve already read that have new replies
  • Unseen: topics you’ve never read at any point (hidden by default, a bit of a niche case)

The hope with the combined new is that the labels topics/replies are a little more intuitive than figuring out the difference between new/unread

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I think “new” are not necessarily topics from the past 2 days. There is a user preference where you can configure which topics appear in new

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Similarly, unread only shows topics you are tracking or watching that have new replies (there is a preference for automatically tracking topics after some time of reading; there is also one for tracking/watching on reply, and when creating the topic, you can track/watch all topics with a tag or in a category, and you can manually edit the topic tracking status of each topic).

So I get why it’s complicated. Especially the fact that not all new replies are in unread.

I think it also helped that this was explained on the pages of /new and /unread. Since those aren’t hidden for new users when they are empty, this used to be a great place to learn how these lists work.

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It just felt like a lot of text to show all the time to users just because they have an empty list, regardless of whether a user account was 1 day old or 10 years old…this is what we show now:

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But there is probably a middle ground, like maybe we could show more info if the user account isn’t very old, or we could add more info in a tooltip? @awesomerobot WDYT?

Overall we still have to do more work on user tips/new user education, hopefully at some point we can get to this.

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I think your post would better fit into the topic I quoted than into this topic.

Since /new and /unread are hidden from the navigation if they are empty I never felt like seeing those all the time.

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This link opens New All Tab not the New Topics Tab

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For UI parity the number of All new should b beside the All tab like Topics

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Ooh good catch, thanks, I will make a fix :slight_smile:

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Okay fix is here :slight_smile:

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Is it possible to show the separate counts for topics and replies in DiscourseHub so I still get the same information I got before this change was enabled?

And is there an easier way to get /new ordered by date like the old new and unread tab used to work without clicking “Activity” twice?

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Hmm this is a bit odd, the list is ordering by Activity by default here on Meta for me:

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So this is not an intentional change…not sure why that “Missing images” one is bumped up for you.

I’m not very familiar with DiscourseHub… @pmusaraj do you know how easy this would be? Basically with enable_unified_new enabled, the New tab shows subtabs with All, Topics (what used to be on /new), and Replies (unread). I guess there is something I haven’t changed in DiscourseHub for this and it’s just showing the combined count as the All subtab would? How can we fix this?

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Maybe because I created the topic? I used the “mark unread” feature on another topic I created and it appears at the top too

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If you mark a topic you created as unread, does that appear at the top?

This is what I currently see in Discourse hub

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On my forum I can see both numbers, because the change is not enabled. For Meta I only see the total instead of separate numbers

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Yep confirmed this is it:

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And I found where this comes from in the code:

Which is what the standalone Unread list does:

I guess since we are combining New and Unread into the one list, it does make sense that we follow those same rules…but I could be convinced otherwise, I don’t have a preference.

@sam and @osama you implemented this list originally, WDYT? Should the “All” list follow the rule of bumping current user’s topics to the top if they are unread? Or should we just order by Activity in All and leave the special unread sorting to the Replies tab?

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I think it is fine to follow the same rule, feels like a big outlier but it will help the people that depend on it

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Found how to fix this up, will need both a core and Discourse Hub update:

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