I’d also strongly recommend the bookmark timer if you read a topic to completion, thus pushing it off your unread (subscribed) list, but you are sure you plan to reply later:
press the … button on the post
press the bookmark button
select a time duration for the bookmark reminder (tomorrow, next week, next month, etc)
I’d be surprised though, that a discussion would just go so totally dead over time?
If it’s any kind of remotely active discussion, it will constantly be pushed back into your /unread (subscribed) tab every time anyone replies to it – and you get those natural, ambient periodic reminders as the discussion continues to grow. Every single reply steadily pushes that discussion back on your /unread tab, again.
As @Heffalump_and_Roo noted, you can also try the /read shortcuts, either at the root, or in your user profile.
All of these. But as @codinghorror says, if I actively plan to reply, there are strategies to deal with it. The frustration is when I read a post, then read one or two more, and then something hits me. I draw a connection, I remember a relevant story, I realize that no one brought up xyz. And then I want to go back and add that.
The thread hasn’t moved on, much, because only a few minutes have passed. But now I can’t #$_&+@ find the thread. And so a few more minutes pass. Or I just give up.
Do you never have any afterthoughts? Do you always process information immediately? I don’t.
Sometimes more time has passed. Maybe I read that thread in the morning, and now I’m reading a relevant news article, and want to post a link. But #¥€&, now I can’t find the thread.
This is very nice. How can i get to it without memorizing that link? (On my phone)
Oh, and it shows me another situation when it comes up. I just followed the link in @Heffalump_and_Roo 's post, and then realized I wanted to reply here, not there, but didn’t know how to get back. But then, i realized i could use that very link to do so! So i did.
Thanks. That’s a lot of clicks for the one place i now want to navigate to by default. Way better than the incredibly frustrating “unread”.
But that’s awesome. It looks good on my phone. I think i looked at it yesterday on my laptop, where it seemed very space-inefficient, but the phone layout is pretty decent.
The one nice thing about the app is that it neatly organizes my three chat sites (two of which recently moved to discourse) so when i feel like visiting a chat site, they are handily displayed. But other than that it seems strictly less useful than using a browser. For instance, there’s no easy way to open a new tab, and my ad blocker doesn’t work. Maybe that last is actually a benefit, since it means I’m supporting the site.
I used a browser with vbulletin. I had used Tapatalk, but at some point it got too into itself, and wanted me to interact with it, and not just use it to interact with chat sites, so I dropped it.
Well for one thing I don’t want to read 2398 relies of “quoted text” I memorized in the first 7 minutes of reading the topic while looking for the answer or the hidden jewels.
I know you’ve made it very clear you’re “virulently anti-paging”…pit stop here…I knew I read that, but had a helluva a time trying to find it without Ctrl-F. I clearly didn’t know/remember the exact phrasing that you used, so it took me a few tries. Finally got some results with ‘pagination’, hit more to get more results, then pick through the results to find that post. Again, a standard ctrl-f, searching up from the bottom, would have found it in a few clicks…anyways. I know you’re “virulently anti-paging”, but at least on this forum, that seems to be one of, if not the biggest complaint. And for every person that asks about it, we get another workaround, another keystroke to memorize that’ll sorta kinda help us out. In the past, all we had to do was hit ctrl-f and type what we were looking for, not trying to remember a dozen different ways to search the board.
To my eyes, some of those shortcuts remind me of when I’m trying to fix a problem with my computer and find myself on a message board full of Linux commands that mean literally nothing to me. They might get my fix my network, but I don’t know what to do with them. For example " in:tracking order:latest" …and do what with that? Type it somewhere? Where? It’s like a friend telling you their car is ‘broken’ and you take a look, hand them a wrench and say ‘you can fix it with this’ and walk away…they’re not going to be able to fix their car.
I know this board is your baby, and I know you’re resistant to change, but a few tweaks, even if they were set up as non-default options the user could change, would make it a ton more user friendly. I will fully admit that I’m old enough to have been using vB…and not just any vB but The Dope’s constantly outdated version of vB for over two decades so I’m very comfortable with that and this, I believe, is the only discourse board I’m on. So maybe it’s me. But I think it’s more than just me. I also think a lot of requests I/we are making aren’t that crazy.
No one is asking you to emulate vB, we just want the option of actual pages back, mainly so we can search for things or at least search for them more effectively than the board software allows us to.
ETA, why did the word pagination highlight itself? Is it because I used a ‘single quote’. I don’t get it. The only time I’ve ever seen highlighting like that is one those boards that offer linux commands. I never knew how they did it (and I’m still not sure why), but I guess that’s how.
ETA 2, In the first ETA I didn’t quote pagination, no idea why it highlighted itself there but when I typed single quote, it didn’t.
Even more confused now.
ETA 3. I think it was because I used the board software to search for pagination earlier, before I typed the post. A refresh of the page cleared it (and I’m sure no one else could see it)
That’s really fucking confusing.
And all of a sudden, i have a use for the “collections” feature Firefox has been telling me about. Browser it is, and that’s now the bookmarked page. No more hamburger menu for me.
Yes, I think the easiest thing in this case is to visit the read tab in your user preferences, which will show you the last things you read, in the order you read them:
visit your user profile (tap your avatar, then tap the rightmost user glyph tab, then Activity – probably easier to use the keyboard here, press g then p as in “Go to my Profile”.)
click or tap the “read” entry on the left side
The link for it is /my/activity/read – you may want to bookmark that.
It is interesting to consider the specific use case of “nobody ever replies to the topic since I last read it, and I did not reply to it either, but I need to get back there somehow”, though I must admit am kind of unclear of the value in a discussion topic that nobody else is replying to… and how often that happens?
At any rate I appreciate your patience @puzzlegal so I can understand where you’re coming from. That’s on me.
yes, so click or tap the search button (or press the search keyboard key) and type in “pagination” with the “search in this topic” checkbox selected:
from here you can use the ↑ and ↓ arrow keys to select a result, and then enter.
Unfortunately, that is one hill I’ll literally die on, so… welp… not sure what else to say? I do try to keep the number of hills I’ll die on to a minimum as I get older, but that’s one of them. Reading is Fundamental and I’m a staunch advocate of The End of Pagination.
The key thing is that we have lots of threads topics that are “active” in that various people are replying to it, but at the rate of one post every couple/few hours. Meanwhile, people like @puzzlegal and I are pawing through topics at the rate of one topic every few minutes.
I too routinely close a topic and a few minutes later realize I did have something (or something more) to say and want to return to that topic. The difference is I’m on a PC, not a phone, I know my way around my user profile pages, and Chrome’s history features, and I have an insane memory for exact words and phrases and usernames. So I have three well-worn avenues of attack to reopen that topic. I have no impression that “stuff disappears” or “moves”.
Diff’rent strokes. But the use case is the same: return to a recently read topic.
Granted that’s an old article, but it’s interesting to note that the majority of commenters also dislike infinite scroll. One even mentioned not being able to use control-f to find a post. Which was a royal PITA for me to find again after I got to the bottom of the comments.
Note that you can start composing a reply to a topic and finish it later – automatic drafts are saved as long as you’ve typed enough characters, beyond the minimum to post.
So another way to potentially approach this is to start replying, type something like “I’ll come back to this later…”, then
the next time you enter the topic*, the composer will pop up with your draft visible
Test it out, and you’ll see what I mean – since you never press the “reply” button to post the reply to the topic, it’s completely safe.
* you can have one draft reply for every topic, in theory. Old unused drafts are silently discarded after a long time (I think a month). It’s also possible to have one, and only one “new topic” draft.
If I’m interested in the subject, I’m likely to be interested in it even if nobody else is replying to it right now. And I might well think of something I want to say about it later even if I don’t know of anything at the moment – for an example, this one I know comes up with me from time to time: I read a thread about something in the news. I don’t have anything to say about it right then, and apparently nobody else does either because the thread dies down. Then, later that day or possibly several days or even weeks later, I see a new story on a news site on the same general subject, or on a new development of the previous one; and I want to post this to the thread I think it’s relevant to, rather than start up a new one. Often there’s no one word or couple of words that comes to my mind that’s unusual enough to search by; and no I didn’t know when I first read the thread that I was later going to want to post something that didn’t exist at the time.
What I’ve been doing is checking the categories I think the thread might have been in, and reading through the titles in each of those categories looking for anything that looks like it might be the topic in question, then checking that thread to see whether it actually is the topic in question. This usually does work, but it takes a while.
– I’ve got to say, @codinghorror, that I’m a bit puzzled by your difficulty in understanding that people may want to reply eventually even if they don’t know it immediately. Even when it’s in-person conversations: didn’t you ever think a day or a week later ‘I should have said that’? One of the advantages of a message-board format is that one can then actually do so!
Well, since my second thoughts are often shortly after I left the topic, it happens to me all the time. And it seems ridiculous that I ought to wait until someone else happens to reply before making the reply that was relevant when I thought of it.
But I think what you may still be missing is that I find it actively stressful that I can’t find things. Maybe I don’t want to reply, maybe I want to read a post to my husband. Maybe I want to steal a reference link to use on another chat site where a similar discussion is brewing. The “why” doesn’t really matter. The problem is that I find it stressful to “lose” something that interested me.
I literally dropped a chat site whose topic was of great interest to me because it was the first time I ran into Discourse, and I found it so frustrating and stressful to navigate. I have since rejoined that site, because sites I was heavily invested in migrated to Discourse, and I was more motivated to cope with its quirks. And having mostly learned to use it, the first site is no longer intimidating.
But do you want to literally scare people away from Discourse sites?
Quite a lot of the posters here talked about how they felt stressed during the transition, and how they posted less because it wasn’t fun anymore. Some of them are back, others post a lot less than they used to. On my other “transitioned to discourse” site we lost a bunch of people. People who came over at first, and then drifted away and stopped posting.
Mostly we lost older people, who think of websites as static objects, and not as actively moving applications. (it helped me a lot to think of discourse as an application rather than as a website, fwiw.) So maybe you don’t mind losing old people? And maybe the features that make it stressful to me aren’t common, and other people found completely different things to be stressful.
But I’ve spent a lot of time trying to “debug” why I had trouble with Discourse. And “stuff disappears” is at the top of my list. And while I’m delighted that (more than a year later) I’ve been pointed to a good way to find stuff, I note that it’s hidden behind about 4 clicks, and the first of those is totally unintuitive.
It’s just something you might want to think about as a website designer.
That’s an incorrect characterization; what I said was:
Generally topics tend to get bounced by new replies, which actively bumps them back on to your /unread. I guess big picture we’ve been at this for 8 years now. If nobody could figure out how to reply to topics, we’d certainly be out of business – I mean the point of the tool is active conversations.
Different strokes for different folks – I remember a lot of people were quite disconcerted by the removal of the floppy drive from the Mac, and the headphone jack from the iPhone. They aren’t wrong.
Quite a lot of topics seem to me to die for a while and then resurface weeks or months later; or die for a while and not show up again at all or not for years.
Maybe I read too much, or in too many categories. Unless it’s something quite recent, I think it’s actually faster for me to hunt for such a thread by my best guess at category than to hunt through a list of everything I’ve ever read on the site.
search button (or press the search keyboard key) and type in “pagination” with the “search in this topic” checkbox selected:
I do try to keep the number of hills I’ll die on to a minimum as I get older, but that’s one of them. 