Yeah this is a bit of a mismatch between the consolidated new and the original topic/reply split implementation.
With the original implementation this setting is simpler to understand… as far as I know this setting is still technically accurate with the consolidated new, but it’s less clear.
What I mean by that is in your screenshots we are only showing new topics created in the last 2 days. If I’m understanding correctly, the confusion is that we’re also showing old topics with new replies beyond that window in the same list.
Again I’m being pedantic and it’s not your fault this isn’t clear, but you have 8 new topics and 607 topics with new replies. You have 615 new “items.”
The simplest way to clarify this might be consolidating the setting too. Maybe it would become…
Consider posts new when [created x]
…and then that gets applied to both?
Though I’m sure there are people with completely valid cases for having separate time periods for both[1], so maybe we have an advanced setting that still allows that sort of split?
we often get feedback that we should simplify, but it’s difficult because when we do stuff like this existing power users miss it ↩︎
I have 8 new* topics and 607 topics with new** replies
*) new topics: topics that are created than X days ago (X depending on setting), and which I have never viewed. “Mark as unread” does not make a topic reappear here.
**) topics with new replies: topics that have replies I have not seen, regardless how old they are.
“Mark as unread” does make a topic reappear here.
So the meaning of “new” differs. For posts it means “unread”, and for topics it means “created less than X days ago”.
If it were up to me, everything would be called “unread” and act like “unread”. I don’t see the idea of having a definition of what a “new topic” is and then limiting the list to those “new topics”. Just give me the topics with unseen items, newest first, call the list “unread” and remove the setting. If the topics I am viewing get too old, I will simply decide not to scroll down any further. And I’m pretty sure those power users will get that. I really do not see any practical application of the current implementation. It’s convoluted, impractical and very hard to understand.
Isn’t that what /unseen provides? To me, the difference between the way unread currently works and unseen is that unread is showing topics with new replies that I am tracking. Topics with new replies where my notification status is “normal” don’t appear in /unread.
I still miss the explanations that were shown on /new and /unread
