Over the past year we have experimented with a refined pattern for new/unread.
The setting experimental_new_new_view_groups on meta now has trust_level_0 which enables this feature for everyone.
This setting “merges” the lists for new and unread into a unified list:
old way: New / Unread new way: New (New Topics / New Replies)
Why?
This experiment is running for multiple reasons:
Over the years people have complained Discourse is too complex, this is an attempt at simplifying things.
This unlocks counts that are simply a number in the sidebar. When you enable show count of the new items in your sidebar you get a very clear understanding of backlog.
Personally, I love this feature. In fact I had enabled it on my self-hosted instance when it was first possible to enable it for our Beta Testers group and most of our members like it.
The thing I would suggest doing differently is maybe make it a user preference in the future, like how the Topics link in the sidebar can be changed based on user preference. The reason is that for some neurologically divergent users the split between new and unread works better than the merged New New view. Having both available as a user preference would be much better from an accessibility standpoint.
I’ve enabled this for all users and explained the change so will see what they make of it. My user demographic is relatively older people who often aren’t that techie so they can be a bit resistant to change at times so their response will be interesting!
The "show count of the new items’ is user based preference with seemingly no option to turn it on for everyone. There is a setting ‘Make navigation menu links show count of new items instead of badges by default.’ which looks to be similar but I’m not sure if it’s exactly the same?
Change: Show a count of the new items from a checkbox to a combo box with the options:
new posts then new topics
new posts
all new
none
This distinction is important cause many people think that “new posts” are very important, whereas “new topics” are a lot less. Mixing the 2 counts in the sidebar for these users means that they can’t just sit back and let “new topics” wash away.
Thanks. The description is subtly different between the two with the global option referring to badges which the user preference doesn’t. Maybe the description could be changed to match in both places?
I’m not sure, but it doesn’t seem to work for me. At least not in the way the screenshot in the initial post indicates. I still get only the “new” indicator, not “topics” and “replies”.
Having a list of unread replies in my tracked topics is actually one of the feature I find extremely useful in Discourse. The only thing that would make it even better would be if I could easily access the tracked topics even when there are no new replies (potentially: a “Tracking” entry in the header row with a number if there are unread replies, and without if there are none).
I do think that the “new” feature could be extended in a useful fashion by including new replies I haven’t seen yet. In fact, my intuition when first seeing this was that I would get new topics and new replies since my last visit, and I was confused when it would rather show me new topics from the last two days by default.
I don’t think the numbers on the categories in the side bar look good. But I have to say, the longer I use the side bar, the less I like it in general, because IMO it represents a navigation option that is partly redundant with the category view. So maybe that colours my perception of this aspect of the proposed change.
Actually, I was referring to the fact you can choose whether or not it links to the filtered list or latest.
For some (like myself) that filtered list link is useful, and honestly I never pay attention to the count, just the sidebar looks weird to me if it’s not enabled
I would love it if the topics link honored a separate setting unrelated to the count display that would respect the unified view if enabled but kept the current behavior if the unified view isn’t used when the Link to filtered list option is enabled.
Then again this is actually why on a lot of Discourse instances I use the /unseen view, but that has its own issues when you’re on a huge instance like the NaNoWriMo forums with a lot of topics set to normal.
It only shows those headings if you’re on the New tab. It doesn’t show them on Latest.
At the moment it looks like this (1) where I can only choose to dismiss all the new topics or replies. I cannot individually select new topics like in the image in my post above. This was previously available before the ‘new new’ was enabled. Does that make sense?
I miss the top level “unread” count/link. I tend to have two modes of reading discourse sites:
checking back in on threads I’ve tracked
choosing new threads to track
Most of my time is spent paying closer attention to threads I’ve already decided I want to pay attention to — the unreads. Only on some visits do I have bandwidth to look for new things to pay attention to (the new). This change prioritizes the latter, which I spend less time doing… and I liked the clearer top-level separation of the two.
A few things feel more confusing to me than before: When I think “Replies” I think posts, but the count on the new page under “Replies” is the number of topics… and then each topic gets a badge with the number of posts. The /unread endpoint still exists and that’s where you land if you choose that to be your home page, but it’s subtly different from /new?subset=replies. I also think it’s confusing that “Replies” appears on the top of the table of topics twice, and I don’t really understand why “Replies” wouldn’t count as “Topics”:
This has been disabled as of 2023-11-26T16:00:00Z
