Dismiss Unread resets topic tracking on affected topics
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The problem is, they don't have any fucking names for their features. I call it tracking because it fits best, but what the hell do you call this otherwise?
It's verbose, but it could say "reset notification level to regular".
Or maybe Atwood should have spent more than 48 milliseconds thinking about his terminology when naming shit in his product.
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It should probably have a big old skull and crossbones on it to prevent people from using it.
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It's verbose, but it could say "reset notification level to regular".
And in probably one or two seconds you came up with a workable name for both that option and the button. They've had who knows how long between implementation of it and now to give it a name and they haven't, and the new name on the existing button sucks more for it.
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Well my name isn't accurate either, since it also marks posts in those threads as "read". So it's more like, "reset notification level to regular and then go back through the thread and re-calculate the read marker as if it had always been set to regular".
Or, now that they have two buttons, they could have "reset notification level to regular" do exactly and only that (meaning: NOT reset the read markers), and then a user would have to hit both that and "mark as read" to perform the operation Atwood seems to think people want.
But of course Atwood would never agree to that.
The weirdest thing in the meta.discourse thread is how Atwood says "tracking" is confusing tech jargon, but then goes on to suggest "dismiss" as something everybody understands. Sure, people understand "dismiss" when used by an Army officer or if you "dismiss someone's opinion", but in the context of a forum? It's exactly as mysterious and arbitrary as "tracking".
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since it also marks posts in those threads as "read".
In one way (counters and the post "unread" dot), but not the other (progress towards Leader). At least according to what was in the quote of Sam's in the onebox.
The real question is, how much of a use case do you have for resetting the notification level to regular for a batch of topics? If it got to a point you were no longer interested, wouldn't you just change it in the topic before you leave it? How many users really want that feature? I know I don't, and you've apparently been bitten by it.
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The real question is, how much of a use case do you have for resetting the notification level to regular for a batch of topics? If it got to a point you were no longer interested, wouldn't you just change it in the topic before you leave it? How many users really want that feature? I know I don't, and you've apparently been bitten by it.
Right; but discovering that would require Atwood to do actual user testing, and obviously he does no testing of any kind whatsoever. Because open source.
Fuck open source.
EDIT: Of course even if he did do user testing, he probably wouldn't believe the results and get into some paranoid state where he was like, "those people were getting confused on purpose! Just to sabotage me! Me, the great Atwood! They should bow before me! No the code will not change. NOTHING will change. MY CONQUEST OF THE FORUM WORLD WILL CONTINUE!"
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While I agree with you that open source software usually lacks user testing... Nope, can't agree completely in this particular case.
Because there is user testing, on, as Atwood would say 2k Discourse instances! Although, from what I gathered, every install attempt is a new instance, so if someone failed to follow their confusing freaking instructions (and I'm saying that as the guy who deals with server software on Linux and can usually manage it no problem) multiple times, that's multiple instances, folks! None of them working, but multiple ones!
No, the problem here is dismissal of test results and feedback. And a big part of the blame has to be put on the guy calling the shots, not the development model. You could argue open source can help actually, by forking the project and leaving the original authors behind. But no one sane wants to fork this shit.
Also, fuck Discourse being open source. How am I supposed to contribute, if I wanted to? I've never seen a project that is this fucking hard to set development environment up for. There are ones with even more setup, sure, but they are not this confusing.
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Because there is user testing, on, as Atwood would say 2k Discourse instances!
Typically when people say "testing", they mean "testing before release". You know, so the customers don't see the 47,238 bugs. Discourse certainly doesn't do that.
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Have you not read, in the Book of Atwood, of the complaint driven development? (No, not linking it!)
Dunno, could work. If it ever gets implemented.
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You'll love this bit by Jeff:
Jeff said:1It is not even correct to say stop tracking. What if I was Watching one of the topics in the unread list? Then per your proposal the button should say "Stop Tracking and Stop Watching", or really " Change These Topics to Regular Notification State"
Hmmm... sounds like someone who has problems with "grey" and prefers his world to be black and white... would be interesting to read up on some disorders to see if anyone matches. Probably not Asperger's, though.
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but discovering that would require Atwood to do actual user testing, and obviously he does no testing of any kind whatsoever.
Wrong. He does user testing. Here, on BoingBoing, on HowTo-Geek...EDIT: Of course even if he did do user testing, he probably wouldn't believe the results and get into some paranoid state where he was like, "those people were getting confused on purpose! Just to sabotage me! Me, the great Atwood! They should bow before me! No the code will not change. NOTHING will change. MY CONQUEST OF THE FORUM WORLD WILL CONTINUE!"
Yup. Perfect prediction of history.
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Back to the OP:
Sam has now implemented the 2 button solution. Discussion has now devolved to refining the tooltips on the buttons.
Has anyone noticed it doesn't really work?
Pressed "Dismiss Posts" last night and (expectedly) ended up with no unread topics but the tracking still in place - now the ones I dismissed last night are showing as unread just with grey counters instead of blue. The last activity on them all was before I dismissed them, and it did work at the time.Suppose the 20 minutes of testing it would have got weren't really enough, surprisingly.
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Seemingly so.....
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Guessing by Discourse's previous behavior, I'm gonna guess it just marks the last post as read, leaving any intermediate ones unread. At least I think that's how the grey markers work.
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