To clarify, I administrate a fairly small discourse instance, with about 30 users. We use this as a kind of private social network, to archive discussions and organize meetings. A lot of times one keeps wondering “did a particular user read my post but doesn’t want to answer - or didn’t anybody read my post at all?”
I researched the internals of Discourse and it seems the number of views is already tracked per topic. The extension to track the views per post and show the users who saw post doesn’t seem to be that complicated.
On the other hand I’m really unsure about the performance impact of such a view tracking. Maybe it would only be feasible for quite small forums just as mine?
We’re already tracking if a user has read a post or not in this table. I think this feature could be useful when you’re chasing someone for a reply and you’re not sure if he is avoiding you or not.
If it’s implemented, then please make it optional. Just imagine the fun a wannabe rhetorician would have with it:
@Immanuel_kant, 15 minutes ago I refuted your Critique of Pure Reason in it’s entirety. You should unsub from the list if you’re unable to defend your thesis.
Best regards
F. Nietzsche
As a moderator it would be useful to be able to check if a particular user has read a particular post, but that knowledge would need to be handled with some discretion:
@armadillo, you claim to have read all the user guides and are still unable to upload images. The fact is you haven’t read any guides at all. And by the way, I also noticed that you haven’t replied to any of the 9 Private messages which @Coelacanth sent you.
How would you handle users who only use emails? A message or digest which went out and didn’t bounce doesn’t mean that the user has seen it.
as an indicator that they read the post rather than actually “liking” it.