This seems to warrant its own discussion. A few thoughts I have regarding the current indicator and its history:
By the time you can see the current bookmark indicator, you’ve probably already read the post, since its below the post.
A long time ago the bookmark icon was on top of the posts. Since it was doing double-duty as the bookmark feature, it made sense to move it down to the bottom, but its more clear not that these two functions are somewhat in conflict with each other.
Its not that useful as is because the indicator is really only visible on the last post you’ve read in a topic. You have to scroll up and down to find it if you’re not already there or entering the topic from the topic list.
So, there seem to be two main goals out of this:
The indicator should show which posts are read and which aren’t.
It’d be nice to have a way to jump to the last read post from within a topic.
So here’s an idea:
First, for the ‘subtle but visible indicator’… ‘a “you read this” indicator on each post’, follow some conventions from email clients. Just style the name and date on each post differently for read vs unread: bold = unread normal = read
Not a goal; the jump to last read post is the topic link itself. And once you’ve seen a post, it is flagged as “viewed”, and read time is counted.
Mostly, this would solve four problems:
People who complain that Discourse can’t tell what they’ve read (well, “viewed”, read time is tracked separately). If there was an on-post indicator, they could see the viewed flag on each post, and it would help troubleshoot.
Give users a warm fuzzy about progress, like painting a house, like watching a progress bar scroll, like crossing items off a to-do list.
If we are moving the bookmark control into an ellipsis expansion, we need some form of replacement feedback about read state.
The bookmark at the bottom is basically useless / pointless in its current state since by the time you see it, the post is marked viewed, so you never see it in “unread” state anyway. A replacement should probably be at the top for the reasons you stated. We know that having it at the bottom is very ineffective, to the point that the functionality of showing read state might as well be pulled entirely (and will be pulled).
I think it should be a fairly subtle indicator. Ideas:
Maybe a colored dot?
Maybe some color transition on the timestamp in the upper right?
There is also space in the left gutter now, though we plan to use that for badge images.
I like this, personally:
Where green dot means “viewed”. @riking if you wanted a dailywtf-helping thing to work on, this is it.
