Someone reads some portion of a longish topic (say first 50 posts) and leaves. 60 posts happen and they get pinged - they go to the post they were notified and now they’ve lost their place.
Potential Solution:
Perhaps when navigating to a notification that’s after your last read post or sufficiently far from your last read post a modal pops giving you the option to to the notifications or to the last read post? That way can pick whether to jump ahead or fully read for context.
This happens to me quite often, and some solution to this would be great. Here’s an idea I just thought of. Perhaps instead of changing how navigation works, the post timeline could be styled differently to indicate read and unread posts. Just to give a really terrible mockup, perhaps a different color or something could show the parts you skipped and haven’t actually read. (Yes, I’m terrible at design, but that’s the general proposal.)
To be clear, this is a self-inflicted wound by the user. They are reading a topic, then the notification they click or tap on, jumps them forward in the topic.
We always track the “lowest” or “bottom” reading position in a topic. That’s what the little back button does on the vertical timeline. We don’t track “reading holes” primarily because it becomes a UI nightmare
About the best I can think of is a dialog that says “are you sure you want to jump forward in this topic and lose your place?” when you initiate navigation to a lower / deeper post in the topic. That might be just as annoying, though, if not more annoying, than losing your place … I’m not sure?
You can always click in the v to show the post the user replied to. Clicking on that will take you to your post. Still, it is not meant to take you to where you left off reading or posted last. It’s just to take you to the reply to the post in question - no matter how many posts later this reply came.
