Spooky tracking happenings 👻

[david (David Taylor)]

@LeoMcA

So, the bug here is that previously opened topics in a category become tracked, and appear in unread (unless previously dismissed), when the category is tracked, whereas nothing happens to old not-opened-before topics.

This is something I found a while ago, and a thread can be found here (not entirely sure why it got moved from bug to feature).

The thread is quite confusing as I originally thought the problem was caused by the initial import from phpBB. So here’s an attempt to summarise:

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

• Even though it’s implicitly tracked, topic does not show up in unread because the user has never viewed it
• Topic does not show up in new because it is beyond the threshold of whatever your “Consider topics new when” setting is

It’s a hard problem to solve, because having every single old topic in a category appear in your ‘unread’ tab is really not a good user experience.

“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).

We didn’t really come up with a tidy idea to solve the problem, and the discussion kinda died. One option that @sam came up with was

@sam

Perhaps, one thing that is “cheap” that we could do.

If a topic in a tracked category is bumped, add it back to “new” for whatever the new duration is.

Still would feel somewhat odd.

At the time, I thought this might be a good idea:

@david

At the moment, the “new” tab is sorted by “topic.bumped_at”, but filtered by “topic.created_at”. What’s the thinking behind this? It seems a little un-intuitive that topics don’t “drop off the bottom” of the list once they’re no longer declared new. What would be quite nice, at least for my forum, would be to filter them by “topic.bumped_at”.

But

@sam

The problem with a change like that is that lots of users will get very confused about how to kick stuff out of new list.

TL;DR: I don’t have a solution, but hopefully this makes the problem clearer