To make things simple , seems to be a difference between having viewed or having read a topic/thread. A topic turns grey if you enter a topic and scroll all the way to the bottom.
I believe the unread count applies to “tracked” topics. By default, a topic changes to tracked if you spend more than 5 minutes inside, and you’ll notice “You will see a count of new replies because you read this topic” at the end of the thread/topic/threadopic.
I believe the dot means it’s a “new” topic that you haven’t viewed. By default, this means a topic created in the last 2 days. So this doesn’t necessarily include all topics you haven’t viewed. You can change this behavior by selecting “I haven’t viewed them yet” in Preferences → Notifications.
Yeah, it’s what we’ve got. You can use this approach if you want to get clear overview of topics in chronological order. Notice the ?order=created.
Because it’s Discourse? This one is something you can change in Preferences → Notifications. So you need to weigh amount of noise versus not noticing a reply in an interesting short thread you’ve “read” (i.e. viewed). Or you could go with “never” and try to make a habit of manually selecting tracked on everything of interest. Quickest way for that on desktop would be pressing ‘m’ followed by ‘t’.
I dunno. Just between you me and the fence post it’s still complicated as heck and surely doesn’t need to be. I keep going to “New”. There will be an indication of 4 messages or boards or categories or everything or whatever they call it but then when I go there instead of 4 there will be 38 messages/boards/categories/or whatever to read. Totally and unequivocally confusing and definitely not easy for sure. And to top it off some of the stuff folks are talking about would require a degree in advance Financial Analysis but I digress. What ever happened to the good old “boards” that had stuff you not only needed but could somewhat understand?
Thanks, I had in mind write a post/topic about it if/when I find time to do so. But briefly:
It struck me that with the rich editing capabilities we now have, you can turn a post into just about anything. A diary, a collection of notes, links to relevant places etc. Here’s something resembling a part of the sidebar for example:
So all that’s needed is a post - kinda like a “page” - that you can edit, and a quick way to access it.
One way is to use the bookmarking feature. If you access your bookmarks via the drop-down menu you’ll notice that you can pin a bookmark. That will keep it on top in your list. Having done that, you’re never more than three clicks away from accessing it.
So, where can you create and edit a post without bothering anyone? Discobot! Just message or write a reply to one of the threads and you’ll have a private post that you can edit and reshape as you wish. Discobot won’t mind.
I started exploring this today so this very much work in progress, but I hope you get the general idea. It’s not point and click but at least a way to create your own little place. And in principle, there’s no need for everyone to reinvent the wheel.
I’d like to, but I need a little more of a step by step. I’m not even sure where to look to start learning. I haven’t stumbled across anything that resembles what you’re talking about.
Definitely no pressure, but if you can it would be great. I’d suggest a new topic for that.
To start with thanks to Peter for taking the time to write all this up.
My eyes (maybe) aren’t as good as they used to be. And perhaps I don’t always read with enough light. Maybe others have the same issue. But I see the dot as a light blue and not grey (in the default color theme) And I “see” this as part of the “problem” many might have with the new format. There isn’t enough color contrast to make things stand out like they did on the old boards. To be fair there are some things with good contrast, like the REPLY button I’m going to click soon to send this post off. But so much of the screen seems to have been designed by a 25 year old on a 30" monitor with very good lighting.
Maybe this is something TMF can configure (or create new themes for) so some of these visual hints are more obvious. Things that are important for scanning lots of messages should stand out rather than just be a different tint of the same few colors.
I should note that back on week #1 I went to my Preferences, Interface and changed the color theme to dark mode, but it seemed to be broken because only part of the screen layout switched properly. I tried it again now and it seems to be fixed. But it seems I like dark mode for the list of posts but I prefer reading a thread in the default lighter mode.
Anyway, people might want to try the dark mode and see if it helps.
Not that I’ve found. Individual posts are not really accessible here. Its the whole thread or nothing. I can help you find the most liked threads, but not the most liked posts.
The problem there is that a 50 post thread with 2 likes per post looks the same as a 2 post thread with 50 likes each. I definitely find one more valuable than the other. But the designer of this platform thinks they are both the same, so that’s what we get.
That makes my job harder. Posts that stimulate emotions, often political posts, tend to get a lot of recs. It will be harder to find them in the larger flow.
Also, I like to read posts from non-METAR boards when they are popular enough to get a lot of recs. The new system will make them harder to find.
Wendy
For what it’s worth I miss the message counts that accompanied the various boards (communities, categories, or whatever you call them), I had maybe 10 or 20 boards that I followed and if I needed help I certainly wouldn’t post in the board that had 1 post this past year I would rather post in the board that had 898,235 posts (exclude Saul’s prima donna site). That way I felt some assurance that my post would get wide coverage. Nowadays who knows?
Probably had something to do with that the designer didn’t know how TMF boards worked and how people used them. I think that the underlying philosophy of Discourse is for broad range of categories which have categories that are frequent created and discussions that are shallow (few replies).
TMF kinda messed up when they carried over people’s (non-stock) favorite boards to the new “Categories” but didn’t carry over people’s STOCK/company favorites but left it for the users to figure out that they needed to add “Companies A-Z” and then tag the stocks that were n their favorites.
It’s almost like TMF made the decisions without having the slightest idea how people used the old boards.
In my job, we used to call this “make the users work for the ease of the system, rather than make the system work for the user.” Yeah, that always resulted in the users bailing.
This system wasn’t designed specifically for TMF. It’s a commercial discussion board program that has been available for a while - much like the older vBulletin and phpBB platforms. TMF chose to use it and almost certainly paid a significant fee to the creators of the platform.
, seems to be a difference between having viewed or having read a topic/thread. A topic turns grey if you enter a topic and scroll all the way to the bottom.
Discobot! Just message or write a reply to one of the threads and you’ll have a private post that you can edit and reshape as you wish. Discobot won’t mind.