"Tracked" (on the left sidebar) is confusing and quite useless atm

Try out the new sidebar and notification menus! - #157 by emilio

I second @emilio’s feeling/opinion about “Tracked” (the one that is located on the left sidebar, in “Community”).

I have expected that Tracked would:

  • show a small blue dot that would inform me that, among the threads that I track, one (or several of them) has been updated with a new comment. Atm, it doesn’t show anything, no “blue dot” notification.
  • lead me to a page with “Unread”: new posts that I haven’t read yet, within the threads that I am tracking.
  • lead me to the same page with “Latest”: a list of all my tracked threads, shown in chronological order (the most recently updated ones being placed at the top).

But instead, currently, Tracked:

  • leads me to “Latest” : You’re all caught up! Ready to start a new conversation? which link I don’t feel like using here because I prefer to go to the right forum category before clicking on the “New Topic” button.
  • allows me to click on “Top” which displays topics that I have never tracked.

atm, Tracked feels pretty useless.
Are there plans to change the behaviour of “Tracked” ?

2 Likes

We are planning to remove it soon.

It’s intent was to show you an aggregate of topics from all the categories and tags you’ve expressed interest in. It does this by showing topics from categories and tags you’re tracking or watching. In an earlier iteration of the sidebar you had to track or watch a tag or category in order to add it to your sidebar. Then we shifted gears and decided to allow you to add things to your sidebar without having to track them. As a side effect, that “tracked” aggregator became more decoupled from the design itself.

The idea of having the ability to have links directly to aggregate topic lists is something we will likely revisit in a completely different way in the future.

4 Likes

Tracked was removed from the sidebar a while back:

4 Likes