I run a fairly small Discourse community and I love it, great features for keeping tabs on conversations you’re interested in and discovering new content.
Something I’ve found myself wanting, however, is a better way of reading up on all the latest replies across a myriad of topics. As someone who’s active and invested in the community, I find myself wanting to check out most every reply, erring on the side of “this could be interesting” instead of not. Problem is, this involves a lot of clicking in and out of multiple threads, many times just to view a single reply that I then quickly scan and determine whether or not it’s interesting to me. Or, I have a strong interest in a specific category, and want to read up on anything posted in that category.
One idea I had to solve this was to somehow display a list of ALL the latest replies to ANY thread, either across multiple categories or in a single category, and then of course the list would live-update and allow you to reply directly from that page. Like a continuous “stream of consciousness” that I can read and reply to without having to click through different topics repeatedly.
Just going off the basic concept, what are your guys thoughts on a feature like this? Does it sound useful, or is it impractical? Does it actually solve a user need? Would more than a handful of people actually use it? What kind of community would be interested in something like this? Is it within the scope of Discourse?
If it would be useful, how would it be implemented? Would it an optional feature admins could enable? A plugin? Would it be placed in the top bar, e.g. next to “latest”, and take you to a new page, or a sidebar like in Facebook that’s always on and filters to the category you’re currently viewing?
I can throw together some mockups if people need more of a visual idea of what I’m talking about.
I have thought about it before, but I feel the use case is narrow. Someone who reads every post, or a moderator, or the site is super low volume. You would lose some (all?) topic context as well, with a stream of the latest replies showing in topic like layout…
The best argument against it that I can think of is that it potentially breaks Discourse’s entire model, turning it into a glorified chat/shoutbox/social network app with lots of tagging and categorization features, which seems undesirable. Keeping discussion focused around topics seems like the whole point, so creating a view that breaks the topic-based flow of information might be a bad idea.
Just wondering if @jspautsch or anybody worked on this in the end?
I’d like to be able to offer an option of a stream-based layout in addition to the regular layouts for those who prefer to consume information in this way (ala Facebook, LinkedIn etc). Have tried searching but not found anything related to this topic hence re-opening an old one.
Guessing it would be a case of pulling in the posts.json and formatting it but no idea where to start with that!
hi,
I’d like to have this feature too - we have many users interacting with topics this way and it’s way more easy to stay in the loop ( or how else ? ).
As a newbie, what’s the process having this ? I can see there is a posts.json but not sure how hard it is to filter. Does this involve hacking discourse or does this goes as plugin ?
One simple hack could be to redirect to the SEARCH function for posts after a date (let’s says for example today less 2 weeks. Or alternatively, you can use “before tomorrow”) and with results sorted by latest posts. You would get what is discussed in this thread, but only excerpts. That would give you the context of all messages, and you then would have to click on what you’re interested in to go into the thread.
Two things which could be great are:
To be able to redirect to a totally empty search with just the “sorted by posts” parameter.
Maybe an option in the search function (with the possibility to trigger it by the URL) to display messages in full instead of excerpts. Then you would already have pretty much what is discussed here.
Hi,
the search hack is indeed nice but still I’d prefer to get this done more nicely. Can somebody give me a short list on how to do this as component ? 1. to 5. steps or so if that is possible. I’d like to use that also to make a module for latest ‘pictures’.
thanks a lot.
g
Hi, this would be an interesting feature that I’ve also wondered Before.
Stumbled upon
and realised it’s almost what we need, but instead of just one specific group, it would be nice to be able to have all groups at the same time in this activity tab and to have it updating in real-time like the latest page and so on.
