Spooky tracking happenings 👻

[LeoMcA (Leo McArdle)]

It comes down to the fact that a topic cannot be both new and unread simultaneously:

From a practical perspective, that doesn’t make sense to me. If I buy a book and put it on my shelf having not opened it, it is both new and unread.

having every single old topic in a category appear in your ‘unread’ tab is really not a good user experience.

Wouldn’t it be possible to have an old topic (with no tracking record) only appear in unread when there’s new activity on it?

Watching and tracking implementation for tags and categories

When a user watches a category/tag:

[…]

• Topics with missing state are watched implicitly, a tracking record is created when we notify users.

So, just as a tracking record is created on new activity for topics in watched categories, a tracking record would be created on new activity for topics in tracked categories.

“Automatically dismissing” them is quite expensive database-wise (a new TopicUser record would have to be created for every single topic in the category you just tracked).

Combined with the above, couldn’t we just dismiss topics where the tracking record has been changed to “tracking” as a result of tracking the category, which would mean the same user experience, without any additional database writes? (If I understand how tracking records, dismissing and TopicUser relate.)

This way, it seems to me, we could have a mailing list experience for tracking too!