"New" topics or posts not necessarily new



  • I don't get it. From the main page I see that it'll color some threads gray and some black, I also see some that have a little circled number next to it. Then I see at the very top where you can show "Unread" posts. However none of them consistently do anything consistent. I have no idea how to tell with any reasonable certainty whether a topic has new posts or not.

    Even worse, I remember reading someone complaining about this same thing, yet there's no search function and I cannot find it to add on my experience.


  • sekret PM club

    The little colored circle next to posts show how many posts have been made in that topic since it started "tracking" you in it, which happens either after 4 minutes spent reading it, you reply to the topic, or you manually select the tracking status at the bottom of the post.

    I don't believe it'll show you that information for topics it doesn't think you're "tracking".

    EDIT: Also, in that same selector you have the option of muting posts, which means you'll never see anything new about that thread, and it'll never show up as Unread.



  • @mott555 said:

    I remember reading someone complaining about this same thing
    Over yonder@mott555 said:
    there's no search function and I cannot find it to add on my experience.
    No repro. Search using the magnifying glass at the top right of the window.



  • @e4tmyl33t said:

    I don't believe it'll show you that information for topics it doesn't think you're "tracking".

    Hurray, another "feature" that breaks expected behavior.



  • @HardwareGeek said:

    No repro. Search using the magnifying glass at the top right of the window.

    Wow, I totally didn't even see those buttons up there. But there's not much contrast between them and the bluish title bar thingie.



  • And now I had the number telling me there are new posts yet there weren't any. Unless it's counting my post. Because clearly I need to be alerted so I know when I post something.



  • @mott555 said:

    Unless it's counting my post.

    Yep, already noted.

    ETA: Except, of course, it is not consistent about that, either.



  • Yeah, new post indicators are definitely broken.



  • @mott555 said:

    Wow, I totally didn't even see those buttons up there. But there's not much contrast between them and the bluish title bar thingie.

    Dude, your monitor really fucking sucks. That is all.



  • Okay, here's an image:

    It's a linear gradient, and the bottom half was posterized in 16 steps.

    Under ideal circumstances, you should be able to clearly see all bars. Circumstances that are not ideal include white forum backgrounds and well-lit offices. You may have hard time distinguishing the darkest three bars.



  • @dhromed said:

    Okay, here's an image:
    <img src="/uploads/default/45/7e326a7c1bbd6e63.png" width="401" height="101">

    It's a linear gradient, and the bottom half was posterized in 16 steps.

    Under ideal circumstances, you should be able to clearly see all bars. Circumstances that are not ideal include white forum backgrounds and well-lit offices. You may have hard time distinguishing the darkest three bars.

    I see all the bars just fine.

    Edit: Oh my God, Intercourse just converted the image in your post to entified HTML when I quoted you..



  • I can see all 16 bars on my work system, but there are plenty of things on these pages that are completely invisible if they aren't positioned just right (using crappy Dell flatpanels that have an extremely poor viewing angle), such as the heart/flag/link/bookmark icons and the "# replies /" indicator.

    It's almost like you're expected to use the mouse even while only READING posts on this thing...



  • @Quietust said:

    the heart/flag/link/bookmark icons

    Yeah, I can see them, but they are ludicrously dim.

    Bad monitors aside, I should just point out that web design like this is awful for people with poor eyesight. I have good eyesight, but this software is an accessibility nightmare.



  • @Quietust said:

    It's almost like you're expected to use the mouse even while only READING posts on this thing...

    Yeah, they only show when you hover, which is an idea so nutty I do not know where it came from or why developers think it's a good idea to keep.



  • @dhromed said:

    Okay, here's an image:
    <img src="/uploads/default/45/7e326a7c1bbd6e63.png" width="401" height="101">

    It's a linear gradient, and the bottom half was posterized in 16 steps.

    Under ideal circumstances, you should be able to clearly see all bars. Circumstances that are not ideal include white forum backgrounds and well-lit offices. You may have hard time distinguishing the darkest three bars.

    I can see the darkest three bars fine, but the lightest two are indistinguishable — well, not quite, but almost. @Quietust said:

    such as the heart/flag/link/bookmark icons and the "# replies /" indicator.
    I have no problem making those out, but the difference between white and gr[ea]y backgrounds is almost nonexistent.



  • So it tells me there's a "new" topic, when it's actually my own reply? It can't even distinguish between stuff I wrote and stuff other people wrote?



  • The contrast is much better on my home PC where I have cheap 22" Asus screens. I can't imagine how cheap the Dells at work must be.

    Still, a freaking website should not become borderline unusable just because you don't have great hardware.



  • @mott555 said:

    I can't imagine how cheap the Dells at work must be

    Really, really, really, really cheap. We have some, too.

    Dell's making really odd deals for their low- and high-end panels.

    $5 panel doesn't perform as well as a $5000 panel. Who knew.



  • @mott555 said:

    I can't imagine how cheap the Dells at work must be.

    They're Dell 2009Wt flatpanels, and while they claim to have 170° horizonal and 160° vertical viewing angles, anything outside of about 90° horizontal or 60° vertical results in significant color distortion (and actually causes #FFFFFF and #FEFEFE to become easily distinguishable, such as in this test image I just threw together).


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @morbiuswilters said:

    It can't even distinguish between stuff I wrote and stuff other people wrote?

    Since the kinder, gentler morbs showed up, neither can I. 😦



  • @boomzilla said:

    Since the kinder, gentler morbs showed up, neither can I. 😦

    Fuck you, boomzilla.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @morbiuswilters said:

    Fuck you, boomzilla.

    Thanks, I feel more at home, now.


  • Considered Harmful

    @boomzilla said:

    Thanks, I feel more at home, now.



  • In the following image, I have placed a subtle arrow to indicate a thread. I had already viewed this thread an spent at least a second or two reading its latest post.

    Upon F5 of the overview, this visited thread that I had visited which had no new posts was nestled thusly between threads that did have new posts.


  • sekret PM club

    ...And? If you're looking at Latest view, that's entirely possible. The latest post in that thread may have just been made after the latest posts in the threads below it.


  • Banned

    It's ordered by activity on the homepage (latest) -- if you want to see only unread or new topics, try the New or Unread links:

    http://what.thedailywtf.com/new
    http://what.thedailywtf.com/unread



  • What's the difference between "New" and "Unread"? Because it seems to me they should be the same thing. Or get rid of "New". I don't care how new or old something is, what I do care about is if I've read it yet.


  • sekret PM club

    "New" is new posts you haven't read yet.

    "Unread" are posts you're tracking that have new unread posts in them.

    At least, that's how I understand it's supposed to work.


  • Banned

    You can define what the terms "new" and "unread" mean in your user preferences. But by default:

    • "new" means the topic was posted in the last 2 days

    • "unread" means you are tracking the topic -- to trigger a track

      • spend 4+ minutes reading a topic
      • reply to the topic
      • you created the topic
      • you changed the notification control at the bottom of the topic to "track" or "watch"


  • "New" does not show threads with new posts, apparently. I've got loads of updates in Latest, but New is empty. So that's not working. I'll check out the prefs in a bt, but it's really strange to me that I have to manually define a thing that feels really natural to me.

    Stuff I haven't seen should be at the top. Stuff I have seen should either vanish or sink. Is there a use case for people who want to see threads they've already seen?



  • That just sounds unnecessarily complicated to me, but it may just be a confusing terminology thing.

    Also, I clicked "unread" since I've never actually tried it before, and I got this. Unread (2) but no unread topics.



  • Ok, I've already set this preference:

    Consider topics new when:
    you haven't viewed them yet

    ...shouldn't that put everything new in New, which clears out slowly as I read threads? It doesn't. :'(



  • I suppose Unread is now what I want, since I set tracking to ALWAYSZ but then what's the point of New? Only showing freshly created topics? And what's the point of Unread, since it has a bookmark icon, so it only show especially tracked posts, but I'm already tracking all posts because I'm interested in all new posts. That feels like abuse of the feature, though.

    Is it such a rare use case for people to be interested in all new content that the UI has been optimized for sporadic viewers who only want specific threads?

    @codinghorror said:

    "new" means posted in the last 2 days

    Do you mean new topic or new post?



  • Gneh, there are two threads I've got in Unread, and the latest post is made by me.

    Discourse thinks I haven't read some of the posts in those threads? I've definitely read every post in there.



  • @dhromed said:

    Ok, I've already set this preference:

    Consider topics new when: you haven't viewed them yet

    ...shouldn't that put everything new in New, which clears out slowly as I read threads? It doesn't.

    Confirmed, that option doesn't appear to do jack.



  • Not as bad as something else I just ran into now - I clicked on an Unread topic which had new posts, and it scrolled to the top of the first one (though seemingly scrolled down a bit too far, as the top was a bit cut off). As I continued reading, a few new replies were made and it automatically appended them to the bottom of the page. However, it didn't seem to realize that I had read them, since when I went back to the Unread list, though, the topic was still there, and clicking on it jumped me to those few new replies I had already read.



  • It puts everything unread in Unread, which makes sense in that sentence, but I think it abuses the concept of "tracking".



  • This all seems too complicated.

    A certain popular imageboard just uses a single "watch" button. Watched threads mean you get notified of every reply, and (by default) every thread you reply to gets watched.

    Also, floating tooltips to show the text of replies or posts being replied to when you hover your mouse over the reference to them, it's pretty nice.


  • Banned

    Tooltips don't work on touch devices, such as tablets and phones, so we try to avoid them as an essential design element, versus a "nice to have".

    You can definitely manually set the notification state of each topic if that's what you want to do. Just use the notification control at the bottom of each topic.


  • :belt_onion:

    I've read a number of ([threads|topics|objects of discourse]) now whose unread counts would not update when I went back to the main listing. Click the \1 again, get sent to a post that appears to be "stuck". My preferences are that the new indicator is set on everything I haven't read, and everything is tracked, so the unread counts should be correct if I've read to the bottom.

    I even sat on the page for a while to see if that fixed it. The only way I can reliably get the unread count to go away on something I've read in full is to hold down End on the page (causing a horrible flicker between the main listing and the page -- interesting and I hope it causes Ruby to die eventually under the weight of the AJAX requests). Click back to the main listing and it's finally marked as read.

    I really don't intend to pile on here (I don't even hate infinite scrolling that much, though I will the first time I try to Ctrl+F to get back to an earlier post I recall), but the new platform kind of makes me want to shoot myself in the head. I don't think I'm unique in that "little" annoyances and quirks are more problematic to me when aggregated than a platform that's all-around shitty.


  • Banned

    What browser, version, and OS?

    Also, when you read a topic, are you scrolling to the bottom where it says "suggested topics"? Give that a shot as well. Reading a post implies you have scrolled past it, though having it display for a moment also works.


  • :belt_onion:

    IE 10, Windows 7 SP1.

    Thanks for the reply. I'm pretty sure I was all the way at the end of the page each time (I use Home and End like it's my job, so I'm glad they're functional at the moment), but I'll make sure of that as I go forward.

    Perhaps the last post should be treated a little differently for those who don't give a toss about suggested topics? (Confluence annoys me with this as well.) I know edge cases are a bitch, but this seems like an intuitive one.

    Edit: Speaking of the End button, this might be a short-lived bug report, but currently it doesn't work on the bad ideas thread. Neither does Page Down. I think it might have something to do with the image in the last post. Holding them down just makes the page jiggle nauseatingly by a couple pixels.


  • Banned

    Suggested puts topics you are tracking first, and has some complex logic to pick "your" stuff first like topics you created on top.. so it should be things you are interested in.


  • :belt_onion:

    Well, I feel like you might be hearing this a lot at the moment, and I say it with all due respect (I actually have a fair amount for you personally), but I don't care. I choose the topics which interest me at the moment -- "I'm so changeable!" -- not those that are suggested for me (I have the same objection to the auto-summarization of topics which reminds me of the dysfunctional Microsoft Word feature). My not reviewing the list of topics that are suggested for me should not cause the unread posts notification to be broken.

    I would also think tracking all topics would throw off the suggestions a bit. I recognize that that's my own preference and that it's a tradeoff, but it still does make the suggestions less relevant and likely to be reviewed by me.


  • Banned

    Still, humor me for a bit and try making sure you've scrolled down past the posts for a bit. Does that help, or is it still a problem?



  • In the case where one has the browser maximized vertically on a 1080 monitor, you pretty much can't scroll past the bottom post (or if short enough, multiple bottom posts).

    I don't have that problem right now that I'm on an iPad, but when I browse from either my home or work computer, the above is my case.


  • :belt_onion:

    @codinghorror said:

    Still, humor me for a bit and try making sure you've scrolled down past the posts for a bit. Does that help, or is it still a problem?

    Oh, I'm still doing that, as I said I'd try. It seems to help in about 90% of cases, but that 10% of cases is still pretty obnoxious. Perhaps I should clarify that in all such cases the post that seems to be stuck as "unread" (along with all posts below it) is not the last post in the topic.

    Is it possible that reading through the posts too quickly could cause one to be missed? (I would think that going back to it over and over as I do would eventually fix that, though.) Is JavaScript possibly breaking at some point so the forum doesn't know I'm reading any more posts at all? It's hard to say, and I'm not expecting a Heisenbug like this to be fixed easily or anytime in the near future, but it does seem to be indicative of too much complexity.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @codinghorror said:

    Tooltips don't work on touch devices, such as tablets and phones

    Oh? Someone had better tell that to Chrome on my S3 then....



  • Another random necro topic revival as recommended by suggested topics!
    Viva la @presidentsdaughter!

    For game rules, see:
    @DrakeSmith said:

    I'm going to start a new game... every time i see a topic in suggested topics older than a month, I shall resurrect it with a comment stating as such.

    @presidentsdaughter


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