We have implemented Discourse for our company’s forums, and I just received the Previous/Next topic functionality as a feature request. I am curious to hear what’s become of this request for the official Discourse project.
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Generally use keyboard shortcuts (press the ? key on your keyboard) or use Suggested Topics at the bottom of every topic, which is a de-facto “next”.
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Both “solutions” will not work for people who got used to this functionality from other forum software.
Howerver, if the team does not see the necessity for this feature, I guess it should be pretty much plugin material we’re talking about here. “Previous” and “next” topics should be the same as in the category list. So starting from the current topic, we should fetch the two neighboring topics, insert the URLs into two buttons, add them in the footer section above the suggested topics, and would be ready to go. However, I wonder how big the request volume for this feature is: I’ve heard this complaint exactly once on my board; and we have 7k users…
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I also will chime in here for a previous/next unread navigation element.
Our community follows a sports team. Just about everything posted decays quickly. Over the weekend, a bunch of threads will be started or added to about the last game, the next game, the performance of league teams, latest recruiting news (it’s a college team). Our members like to check in and read up all the new threads, or new additions to threads, and know they’re caught up. It’s like browsing a sports section that is only about your team.
Right now that requires a lot of pogo-sticking to the top of the categories’ lists.
The suggested posts is a good idea when the community topics are not so ephemeral. Right now, when the team we follow is playing, say, Michigan, the suggested topics might be the last Michigan game, or another IGT (in-game thread) for another team (presumably because we use the same abbreviation in the topic title).
There’s very little call for contextualizing our posts/topics beyond recency.
I can see where many (most) communities would benefit from this kind of thing. I once managed a staff of information architects who worked on ways to provide contextual links on 50,000-page Web sites; it’s hard to do, but has a huge payoff when done well.
Ours is not one that benefits. Discourse is superb for us in so many other ways that not being able to quickly go to “next unread” it is a minor annoyance. But it would be a nice addition.
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Some of this may be solvable quite easily with a few switches
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Should you consider tagging here, so there is some way to glue team games together? Eg: tag Michigan games with #michigan
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Perhaps we could enable a mode were last N topics where there is tag and category overlap always show up in suggested.
We’re actually not interested in last year’s Michigan game - that was an example of the kind of algorithm-driven suggested link that makes no sense for us.
We’re just looking for a way to read through all new posts without having to return the the “latest” list to do it.
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But suggested already does that, can you explain how it is failing.
If there are unread posts in topics you are tracking we will show them in suggested first.
If there are new topics suggested shows them second
Otherwise … random
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That’s what I do, almost always.
If I have understood correctly, I think it is related to this:
For example, today I read through my unreads here on Meta. Then I read through new topics in a couple of categories I’m watching. Having read the last of these in Features, I’m presented with this:
However, visiting the “New” page shows there are still at least two new threads in UX, a category I’m watching, but these are not shown to me as suggested topics. Instead, I see Support and Dev, which I’m not watching.
As I said in the other thread, my expectation would be that “Suggested” prioritises categories I’m watching, but this is not the case for new topics.
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I may be misunderstanding, or in a weird situation that is not bringing out the best.
We migrated our forum from an existing SMF install. Many thousands of messages. Users are not that psyched, so new posts have been low.
It may be that without new posts, the suggested posts is over-represented with what it believes are the best possible but are actually of little-to-no relevance.
As all users are wont to do, I have begun ignoring the suggested posts when my first experience with it was not helpful. I’ll pay better attention.
We are also suffering from being used to the features we had that don’t have an immediately obvious parallel on Discourse. In most (maybe all) cases, there is a parallel that we just have too stumble upon.
SMF had its own problems (UI and everything else), But getting to the bottom of new posts on a thread and simply hitting “Next” was kind of nice. 
You may want to go into site settings and turn down the suggested time interval, which defaults to 1 year, to something like 3 months so it is only suggesting more recent topics (when it can’t fill from new and unread).
This is where I am struggling big time. If there are no new posts, nothing is going to really help you.
If there are new posts in tracked topics OR new topics… they will always be on top of suggested before anything else.
Maybe the issue is that you have a huge number of OLD topics that nobody is tracking?
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Thanks for all the feedback on this … Reduced the time frame on related to 30 days and at least the related are now somewhat relevant due to recency.
We’ll see how it plays out.
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@codinghorror Je suis revenu sur ce sujet maintenant que j’utilise beaucoup la barre latérale.
Ce qui se passe généralement, c’est que je consulte un « sous-ensemble » de sujets, mais les suggestions ont tendance à privilégier les mauvais éléments pour moi.
Plus précisément, je travaille sur un sous-ensemble spécifique (nouveaux sujets dans « ux »), mais des éléments « non lus » aléatoires ont tendance à s’immiscer dans les suggestions. Ce sera un problème encore plus grand avec divers filtres avancés comme « suivi », etc.
Je pensais peut-être commencer par un raccourci clavier uniquement pour passer au sujet « suivant/précédent ».
Comment ça marche ?
- Lorsque vous visitez n’importe quelle liste de sujets (top/non lus dans une balise, etc.), nous gardons en mémoire le filtre utilisé (cela devrait également fonctionner pour la recherche sur toute la page).
- Lorsque vous tapez t n, cela vous emmène au sujet suivant dans la « liste la plus récente ».
- Lorsque vous tapez t p, cela vous emmène au sujet précédent dans la « liste la plus récente ».
Dans l’ensemble, j’ai rejeté cette fonctionnalité pendant des années et des années, mais je vois maintenant à quel point elle peut être extrêmement utile pour des workflows spécifiques.
Qu’en pensez-vous de faire de cela une fonctionnalité de base (raccourci clavier uniquement) ?
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Je pense que c’est acceptable en tant que raccourci clavier.
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Dans Gmail, la pratique antérieure consiste à utiliser j et k pour cela ; il est clair que nous ne pouvons pas les utiliser car ils sont déjà attribués. Cependant, il est très intéressant qu’ils aient choisi d’utiliser le même raccourci que celui employé dans la liste.
Je tente de passer en revue les raccourcis existants pour voir si nous pouvons utiliser une seule lettre intuitive ici. Les flèches droite et gauche sont intuitives, mais elles manquent sur certains claviers et risquent d’être trop faciles à appuyer par erreur. Je vais donc commencer par un raccourci à deux lettres, sauf si j’ai une illumination soudaine.
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C’est terminé pour la navigation de niveau supérieur, les tags et les catégories, conformément à :
Je vais voir si je peux l’ajouter aux MP, à la recherche et aux favoris, mais les bases sont toutes là.
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