There needs to be an ability to stop tracking a topic individually from the unread page without having to click into each topic. Adding the little tracking dot at the end of each topic row would accomplish this. Either that or a checkbox list that we can select multiple with and apply tracking preference to all selected.
The way to do that now is to enter the ones you want to look at and when you’re done click the “stop tracking these topics” (or something like that) checkbox.
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I understand that, which is why I included it in my post. When you have 200+ of them it can be quite cumbersome to click in and out of X amount of topics when there’s no reason to have to do that.
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Why? Read the ones you want to read, then dismiss the remainder via the Dismiss… button on the unread page.
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That requires you to click into all of the ones you don’t want to unfollow, in order to unfollow all of the ones you don’t want to read. It’s just as much work or more than clicking into the ones you don’t want to follow to get to the control. If you don’t have time to read them all you can’t ever get to the dismiss button.
When you have 10 in your list it might be fine, but when you have 200 it’s a huge pain.
Instead of clicking on and having to read through 100 threads of 200, I could just click a stop tracking control instead.
Not true, the dismiss button appears at the top and bottom if the list is large enough.
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It’s not location, it means I have to read all the topics I want to keep first which is incredibly daunting, because I would have to do it in one sitting. When you are on a big board it’s impossible because once you start getting them read, the new topics jump in marking them unread again. It’s impossible on an active forum.
I’m still weeks behind on some boards and won’t be catching up. This means my list is in the 100s+. I have to manually click into every topic to unfollow, or read every single one of them then dismiss(which won’t happen).
So dismiss them all then? If you don’t know what you want to read, then how can you move forward?
So here’s the situation:
I have over 300 things in my queue, probably half of which I don’t care about. I have no way to read through the backlog in a reasonable amount of time. By the time I would make it a good portion of the way through, ones I’ve already read will have new responses and be back on the list. These threads are long, sometimes with 10s or 100s of replies to read through for each one. Sometimes I’ll spend 30 mins to an hour or more reading and replying to just one topic. Multiply this by 300 and you can see how my queue stays full. This leaves me unable to use the dismiss button. I either unfollow everything and lose the topics I want to follow, or mark everything is read and have the unwanted threads popping back up.
I can tell by the titles the ones I don’t want to read. Having to click into each one to untrack is extraneous, but it’s the only management option I have for now as the list is constantly refilling due to heavy traffic.
If I was able to unfollow from the list directly, it would be much more efficient, and I wouldn’t have to keep losing my place on the list going in and out of topics. I could at least widdle out those I’m uninterested in to not have them pop back up. To be able to just click down these items would say me copious amounts of time and frustration, ESPECIALLY on mobile.
One gesture I use often in my mail app is swiping an email(equivalent of a topic here) left to delete it and right to mark as read/unread. This would be awesome on mobile and save me boatloads of time. The little dot could be displayed on desktop
You have a fundamental inflow > outflow problem, and no software feature is going to “fix” that for you. If there is more water going into the bucket than going out, the bucket will always overflow.
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In this case that’s not accurate. Im a UX developer by trade, and have spent years developing interfaces to manage large data sets for CRM systems, Reporting Systems, and other large data interaction platforms. This problem is easily remedied by tools.
So many companies develop around small data sets/limited scope usage and completely degrade when it comes to managing larger load. While this is on very active forums, it can easily be solved by the solution(s) I recommended. It would be much more manageable to have a stop tracking function per topic on the “unread” page than having to click in and out of each topic, or to try to read every topic so I can use the dismiss button. The uglier way would be to have a checkmark by each topic and allow that to be affected by the dismiss button instead of all of the entries in the list.
Its been implemented in any number of other interfaces and applications and has drastically increased usability there.
Discourse is an amazing forum software, but there are a lot of limits when dealing with large amounts of data for a user. Ive been perfectly fine navigating smaller forums, but when you get to the ones with a large user base, all of this extra steps and pitfalls make it much more complicated to handle effectively.
Take for example the overwatch forums at blizzard. They have tens of millions of people as customers and their forums just fly. Some thought should be put towards being able to navigate these forums lest they become unusable (which there are a number of features that are approaching that on larger sites)
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If you use a reverse workflow using keyboard shortcuts you can use:
j k to highlight each row. Then b to bookmark what you care about.
I am not against allowing a “quick” dismiss using keyboard shortcuts that flicks a topic you were once tracking into Normal similar to how bookmark works but it is a bit of a ninja feature for a very very specific type of users, plus we would need to worry about undo there, the UX is not crystal clear even for a power user.
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This is still a huge issue. Especially on mobile.
I would love to be able to swipe left or right on a topic in unread and have it marked as read and unfollow it.
Answer is the same as it was the last time you asked.