I’ve been active since the boards came back, on both sides. I am not missing anything by following Tracked. Not missing anything on my old Favorites that is, or new stuff I have marked at Tracked. Yes, the counts are unreliable, so I treat them as minimums. It would be better if they were correct, but I can live with that because I know about it.
Perhaps that is why it works for me. I have been keeping pretty close to up to date. But I don’t think so.
Well, that didn’t take long. So here’s a bit of background. These are the boards included in my tracking:
You’ll note that include METAR (which I’ve highlighted)
Here is the current list of tracked topics:
You’ll note only one topic on HWTSC.
Lastly, here is the full list of topics on METAR:
There are two topics there, including one that is more than half an hour old. That should be plenty of time for any caching issues to clear. You’ll have to trust me that I took these screen shots about as quickly as I could navigate from place to place.
Clearly, there are unread topics on a board that I am tracking that do not appear in the list of tracked topics.
I’m open to the concept that I’m doing something wrong here, or I’m not understanding something about how these boards work. If that’s so, that’s fine.
–Peter
Peter, I think there is a difference between “unread” and “new”. Try finishing reading all the unread posts (or Dismiss then), then check out the sidebar. Mine changes to “17 new”.
I just tried an experiment. I started at the basic discussion.fool.com page. I made sure there were not filters. I selected Latest. Then I scrolled down looking for unread messages. The ones I found were all topics I skipped or did not have as Favorites. I kept going until everything was from the old system, which covers everything on the new system so far. So I haven’t been able to reproduce your experience.
Yet. 
I think @5761796E65 nailed it here @ptheland, note that in your image below there is one unread message Unread (1) and in the top menu at the left of that there are two new messages New (2).
Now can that be confusing? Absolutely.
If you dismiss or read your unread topics the sidebar is going to show you New (2) and will take you to the new topics page. As I said before the sidebar is a new feature so I expect that it will evolve and the user experience will improve over the time. Even with it’s flaws we still felt this was the closest we could get to our old favorite boards feature so opted to include it.
OK. I do see that behavior.
Next question. Aren’t new topics by definition unread? It seems silly to me to differentiate here.
Let me see if I understand this. Is it that “new” means a topic I have never read, and “unread” is a topic that I have read but has new posts on it?
I think you’ve nailed it.
–Peter
From the Discourse documentation
By what’s ‘New’ to you: by default, new topics are those created in the last 2 days that you have not opened yet to keep the list fresh and relevant. New topics show a small blue dot next to the topic title
By what topics are “Unread”: by default, unread topics are those that you have previously opened and read for at least 4 minutes, and that have new posts (replies) submitted to them. Unread topics show a number in a blue circle indicating how many new posts are in the topic.
I suppose it makes sense to first visit the threads I’ve already been in (unread), then visit the new threads. Although I’m sure it breaks someone’s workflow.
But maybe the old topic have been hashed to death and the new topics are far more interesting and relevant. Or maybe the new posts are by people I really want to read, and the old replies are by someone I am more ambivalent about reading.
This system is defaulting us to the old topics first. Worse, it’s arbitrarily separating out the two, when some of us view them as the same thing: an unread post that I may or may not want to read, depending on the topic and the author. Which is hard to suss out in this platform. But something that the old platform did very well. (Here’s all of the new posts sorted by posting date, with the topics, the authors, and how many likes they’ve generated readily available for you to pick and choose what to read.)
–Peter <== not exactly playing at Devil’s advocate for the moment. It’s a serious benefit to the old boards.
Quick note on replies – with the editing functionality of this system, I don’t see any reason for someone to be making multiple replies in a row to a thread. If you have more to say, just go add it to your most recent post instead of lengthening the thread with another one.
Is there any case where you genuinely need to add new posts instead of just editing your previous one?
Clicking on my avatar takes me to old discussions, maybe even dropping me into the middle of something last May? I see no reasoning/logic to any of it…
So after semi sorting out Categories, Tags, I am still seeing nudges to posts in stock boards I’d never have normally checked into… Pretty chaotic, yet I see no way to block them, or it’s just too bothersome to do that chasing…
Overall, I think we’ve lost so many of the core Fools, to recover… There are other venues, more related to our personal interests, it’s just a shame to see this come undone as it seems to be. I suspect the more serious investors, must be overall as messed up as the rest of us… For example, here it is a Monday, the market is up, generally, tons of stuff going on in the world, yet all I see are mostly our grumbles, rather than the geopolitical discussions we once saw…
weco - realizing that beating on a dead horse is pretty useless…
Just my impressions… The Premium side seems to be settling in to discussions with about the same characteristics as before, though volume is down. The free side seems more obsessed with the changes.
Some (most? all?) premium side users have had access to this board software for a couple of months. So they’re more likely to have gotten past the initial changes and settled in by now.
–Peter
Nope. Only the Options service was on there early, a very limited group. The rest of the Premium side didn’t start to convert until one week before the public boards, and the Premium company boards were at the same time as the public boards. A one week head start is not insignificant in this case, but it is nothing like months.
Ok. But couldn’t any premium side users also look at the Options board to start getting a feel for this environment?
No.
Members only have access to the boards associated with the services where they are members.
Vicki
So if one becomes a Member they lose access to the Freemium side? Ahh, the joy…
No… everyone has access to the free boards. On the Premium side, there are boards accessible to all paying members (“Premium Central”), boards accessible to those subscribed to Stocks Advisor, boards accessible to those subscribed to the Options service, etc.
Yes. Simple examples: an investing chronicle or a thread summarizing news regarding a company. You might wanna separate your entries instead of adding to a giant growing wall of text. Individual posts are automatically dated, can be bookmarked, show up as unread and so on.
(An X-in-row limit might be a good thing in a typical discussion thread though. Just pointing out some genuine use cases. We’ll find out when we get there.)
Without getting into the debate of threaded vs unthreaded, are there any options/workarounds available? Threaded view per se doesn’t need to add to confusion. The number one thing I’m missing is the essential columns “posted by”* and “[date] created”. Those two columns would imho address a lot of the things raised in this thread. As of now you only have “Likes”, “Views” and “Activity”.
Unthreaded view automatically gave you the when and who of an event, like “Company X raises guidance” or “My monthly summary”. In a threaded view this easily gets confusing when someone replies at a later date - pushing old news to the top.
Would be great to be able to easily see and sort by created date (and topic starter*). Again, I believe this would help mitigate a lot of the frustration raised in this thread.
(* = To be fair, this is already shown as initials or avatar.)
When I view a category, I see the icon of the original poster. There does not seem to be a creation date available to display.
Disclaimer: I am an end user like yourself, with no relationship with TMF. I’m not speaking for TMF
And I’ll just clarify the options for modifying the software. Discourse is using the SaaS model. TMF is subscribing to a ready-made platform. Discourse offers a couple ways to modify sites, themes and plugins.
Themes are CSS, where visual customization can be made. Normally, it cannot retrieve data (like date-created), if it was not in the original HTML. TMF can add add new themes, which the users can select from in their profile.
Plugins can add new functionality. However, in the hosted version, there is a short list of supported plugins. To use custom plugins, Discourse needs to be self-hosted. Based on my understanding, TMF is using hosted.
Another option is to request new features to be added to Discourse. TMF did this for the pinned categories/tags on the sidebar.
Final option, Discourse is open-source. So anyone can take the code and modify it in any way.
