Possible "take me back to where I was" button on progress bar

[cpradio]

Does this sort of tie in with

Ability to mark any post as unread

Continuing the discussion from How Coinbase Uses Discourse to Educate Customers and Improve SEO: The interviewee of the referenced blog article states the following dislike: If a post on a topic can be “unread”, why can’t I mark it unread again after reading it? and I’d like to talk a bit about that and the workflow that is not possible at the moment. Concept In email clients, you can mark any email as “unread”, even in a longer discussion or thread, and return to it later. Most clients a…

Where @sam states, and I quote/link to

Ability to mark any post as unread

A much higher priority for us is to have a cleaner way of dealing with “reading holes” eg: topics where you read post 1-10, 50 but did not read 11-49. If what you are describing would likely create reading holes and not behave in a very intuitive way cause you could only do it effectively for the last post in a topic.

So if Discourse adds the ability to find/uncover “reading holes”, doesn’t this solve your need?

[mcwumbly (Dave McClure)]

It is related, but I don’t think it has to be so sophisticated. I think what I’m proposing is the simplest possible way to address all of these concerns.

The first unread post == the beginning of my first reading hole.

To change the definition of “where I left off” from “last read post” to “first unread post” may only require changing the implementation of a single method (haven’t looked at the code, so that could be wrong).

In any case, this proposal I’m making is somewhat orthogonal to the feature @codinghorror is already behind. Adding a “where I left off” indicator on the new progress bar sounds great. Let’s do it. Even if it means “the last read post” for now.

We can separately debate whether “where I left off” should mean “last read post” or “first unread post”. Feel free to split these posts out to a separate topic.

[cpradio]

@mcwumbly

To change the definition of “where I left off” from “last read post” to “first unread post” may only require changing the implementation of a single method (haven’t looked at the code, so that could be wrong).

That also makes sense to me. I primarily wanted to related the two discussions as there seems to be conflict internally about showing those unread holes. I actually wouldn’t mind being taken to the first unread post in a topic versus the last post I read (as it should be close 90% of the time). The former purely covers the rare cases too.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

@codinghorror

Regardless, I think the last read point can be calculated as:

• largest contiguous set of read posts
• prioritizing the set that includes first post

This gets weird though, better to think of it as “take me back where I was before I started jumping to footnotes”

As covered above.

But right now, and since Feb 2013, the definition of “your Last Read point in a topic” is, and has always been, the lowest reply you have read. I’m not sure that should change.

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

I think this get quite heated cause the need for this is super rare, but when it happens it is quite painful.

For example, as your account

Go here: Count to ten thousand! - games - Boing Boing BBS

Now, if you ever checked out that topic before (likely) you have no way of “catching up on stuff you missed”

I think this pain point only happens IF there are over 50 posts in a topic, which automatically limits it in scope to less than 1% of total topics in all Discourse instances.

Adding facilities to deal with this can very easily impact a vast majority that do not care about this level of complexity. To illustrate the confusion.

1. I start tracking a topic
2. I reach end somehow
3. New post is posted on topic
4. We display (blue circle) with 1 in it
5. User clicks on topic
6. User gets to some (what may seem random to them position in topic) - not 1 from end not 1 from beginning just somewhere.

So I am against changing the definition of “last read” globally, I feel it would just cause a lot of confusion. I think the best way to address this:

1. Introduce a keyboard shortcut for “first unread”
2. Experiment with said shortcut
3. If the shortcut is amazing consider adding a link into the expanded “top/bottom nav thingy”
4. Consider this when implementing the custom scrollbar (it can highlight unread areas)

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

This is something I want to get to in 1.6…

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

@mcwumbly

If I am jumped ahead by someone’s link

This feels so, so rare for me that it’s weird to focus on it as a goal.

@Mittineague

on rare occasion there is either a new topic or a topic with unread posts where someone @ mentioned me. If I go to that post via the Notification I need to scroll back to read any previous posts in the topic I hadn’t read.

This is definitely fair and has happened. I’d like to hear other stories of how frequently people find themselves moving arbitrarily forward in the discussion. For me, it is extremely rare. I move backwards in discussions all the time, but almost never jump forward in discussions.

But I would prefer to focus on getting the common “go back” case correct first – and the common case is to scroll up (backwards in time) in the discussion.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

I believe the improved back button on the timeline we introduced in 1.7 covers this.