How to set a default for 'Category' view?

Suppose you have ‘Mechanical Investing’ as a category in your sidebar. If click on ‘Mechanical Investing’ the default view is ‘newest’.
But I want the default view to be ‘Latest’. How to set it?

If you click on it ‘Latest’, you get a sorted list from most recent post to oldest posts. I don’t want to click ‘Latest’ each time, I want it as a default because sometimes I’ll have a mental note of a post I want to read later, or read again, and seeing it in a sorted list like this will remind me that I want to (re)read it.

OT: The avatar issue:
How to get rid of the avatars and go back to the poster’s username?
Squinting at some colored circles and guessing what they mean is much harder than casting your eye over simple typeface that displays the username. Yes, you can mouseover the avatars, but there’s a delay to display the name and it’s such a clunky extra step.
Another problem I see with the new avatar interface is that you don’t know who posted what/when without going into the whole thread of full-text posts and scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and …
The old interface had a list of links of replies identified by usernames and it was dated. If you say to yourself ‘Self, I want to re-read that post/reply by Jim about two days ago’ then in the new interface you’re scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and …
No? Or is there a fix?

3 Likes

If there are new posts the logic works that is shows New Replies (unread) first with a count and link, then New Topics (new) with a count and link. It’s filtering new for you and basically jumping you to those, like the old my.fool.com did.

If you just want to see latest all the time, you can click the Category name in the Center panel of the home page - that just opens that board.

As for the avatar, they are in rough order of posting…the OP is always first, the most recent is last, unless it’s the OP. If the OP is also the most recent, there will be a purple-ish ring around the avatar.

I’m confused, when I posted my question I used this description:
Suppose you have Mechanical Investing' as a category in your sidebar. If click on Mechanical Investing’ the default view is newest'.* *But I want the default view to be Latest’. How to set it?

Now, I don’t see what I described above. Instead, when I click on `Mechanical Investing’ in sidebar I see two choices next to “sort”, which are “latest” and “top”, and latest is greyed in as selected (so now I’m sort of OK with it).
But has something changed? Or am I misremembering? Or am somehow lost in the interface and now doing something differently than when I posted the original question?

IMO, the avatar thing is bad:

  • see my original comment in top post of this thread
  • it’s also wasting screen real estate (actually, it’s making new distracting real estate) to give you info about a poster, when in fact most of the real estate should be used to give you info about topics (which is why you’re there in the first place i.e. your main interest is info on a ‘topic’ and not info on a ‘poster’). Most people on these boards already know, and like or dislike, various posters given their past posts, so an elaborate info mechanism to give info about a poster that wastes screen space isn’t needed.
    Furthermore, clicking on an icon doesn’t take you to a post by that poster in the thread, it brings up info about the poster. Please don’t waste screen space on distracting icons that give info about the poster, we’re there for the topics.
    Perhaps I’m just resistant to change but IMO the old threaded interface was much better:
    a short list of text (i.e. links) within a thread, that was dated, and you could click on a posters name in the list and see what their post was. I see no advantage of this new interface over the old.
4 Likes

I’m going to guess there was a new post when you clicked it so it shows you the New view. Right now, there are no new posts so it’s showing Latest as the default. It’s not that you are remembering anything different, it’s that it performed differently because of the new post (which you have now read, it knows that, and it goes to Latest)

What does “Top” mean?
The mouseover says “the most active topics in the last year, week, month, or day”.

  • Which is it?
  • What does “active” mean? When I hit “top” I see a list of topics/posts, but the list is not sorted by “replies”, by “likes”, by “views”, or by “activity”, so what does “top” refer to?
2 Likes

To answer my own question, there’s no default sort:
You click on ‘likes’, ‘views’, ‘activity’ and it will sort by that.
You can click on ‘all time, year, quarter, month, week, today’ to choose timeframe (words that don’t agree with the mouseover).

I don’t see myself using this, so the ‘top’ button is more wasted/distracted space.

Like you, I also primarily want to see “Latest”, not “New”. I’m not sure if there’s a way to change the default behavior, which is to display New if there are new posts, and Latest otherwise.

That said, I personally don’t tend to want to browse individual categories. I’m happy to see all the categories I’m interested in at once. Fortunately, the Latest/New/Top/etc view is specified in the URL. So I track these categories, and then I use this URL as my starting point (bookmarked): https://discussion.fool.com/latest?f=tracked

This takes me to the “Tracked” section of Community, with Latest selected. You might find that an acceptable solution.

1 Like

Mine does not appear to work like this – at least if I read all the topics shown in the default view, it does not switch to the next view even if I go to another board and come back. Only if I refresh does it switch, and even then it seems iffy. I usually end up clicking on Latest because default view was showing empty (and then I see a bunch of posts I’ve yet to read)