As a nearly 20-year mostly-lurker, I find that I am very interested in reading far more threads than I actually respond to. I like that Discourse automatically starts tracking the threads that I read, and I can set it to stop tracking the ones that really don’t interest me, for whatever reason. The unread threads page then shows any threads I’ve been reading that have had activity since I last viewed them.
It’s close, but that search only returns my posts, not the last post in the thread. There’s no way to see who the last poster was, and when I open one of the links it opens to my post, not the most recent post.
I’m also not entirely sure that will include threads I don’t post in but mark as Watching, much like choosing “Subscribe to this thread” on the old boards.
The solution upthread shows the last poster of each thread and opens to that most recent post, both of which is better for me. It should also handled “Watching but haven’t posted” threads just fine.
There are things that I like, and things that I don’t like.
I don’t like how LOoooooonnnnng it takes to load on my phone.
But I love this (which I susepct is related)
In fact, I can start a post on my phone, and then edit it and post it on my laptop!
Agreed. And I wish the ones it had were easier to find.
You can have any color as long as it’s a green or pinkish highlights.
green
pinkish
small text - normal text - Big Text
Heading 1
Heading 2
Heading 3
Heading 4
abcsuperscript
abcsubscript
strikethrough
- Indented text
- Indented level 2
I like it just fine, but infinite scrolling is endlessly (heh) infuriating, a blight on humanity.
“Hey, why have these things called ‘books’ that cause us the pain of have to lift and turn pages, when we could just put all our novels on papyrus scrolls instead?”
(But yes, other than that Discourse is a huge improvement over where we were. Not sure it is hugely better than XenForo, but it’s certainly as good, just different.)
It is rarely used but https://boards.straightdope.com/posted is similar to what you’re asking for. Just because you posted in a topic doesn’t necessarily mean you are watching or tracking it, but it usually does.
Thanks!
Yep, that’s what I was looking for, thanks! It even has the red line. (“Read” line. heh.) Very nice touch.
So here we have justification for a content-less “Just posting to subscribe to the thread” driveby. On vBulletin you could subscribe without posting.
You can subscribe to a topic via the bell icon docked at the right below the timeline, or the bell icon at the bottom of the topic. It is not necessary to post to subscribe.
But will threads one has subscribed to but not posted to show up on that ‘posted’ page?
Because, if not, in order to use that page for a ‘new posts in subscribed posts’ function, it will be necessary to post in each such thread.
ETA: And I think it would be useful to draw more attention to that page. I’ve been asking for something with that function since almost as soon as we moved to these boards; and have gotten a number of less useful suggestions, but never that one (until now).
This page is built into Discourse – at the top, Unread. That means “topics I have subscribed to with unread posts”.
Latest | New (9) | Unread (10) ←
That is really handy, thank you.
I hated the new site at first, but it has gradually grown on me. I do like the notification features so I know when someone has replied to me. On the old website, the only way you could know if someone had replied was to manually search and skim through the threads yourself.
At the top of which page? I see Categories, New, Latest, Top.
It will only appear if you currently have Unread (subscribed, with new replies) topics.
Similarly, New will stop appearing when there are no more new topics.
If the site admins have deleted “Unread” from the top menu, then it won’t appear. That’d be a bad configuration for users in my opinion, but it is possible.
I don’t see it either, but going to “unread” directly brings up something that’s pretty close:
https://boards.straightdope.com/unread
As best I can tell, it’s showing me all threads that I’m tracking or watching, not just the ones I’ve posted to. So if I switch to “unread” as my default bookmark, then that solves the problem of an old zombie I participated in getting bumped and me not seeing it. Those should all be set to tracking.
The only downside is it also includes all the threads I’ve only read. I guess it’s easy enough to open any thread you want out of the list and set it to Normal. That was the same procedure as vBulletin to abandon a thread; you had to manually open it and Unsubscribe to get it out of the list. Same procedure = no complaint from me.
I think that’s the full solution then. A little FAQ might be helpful. Something like:
Q: Where is my Subscribed Threads list?
A: Use the link https://boards.straightdope.com/unread. Note that going forward, simply reading a thread will auto-subscribe you to it. (Marked as “Tracking.”) You can adjust or disable that in Preferences => Notifications.
Q: But what if I only want to see threads I’ve posted to?
A: Use the link https://boards.straightdope.com/posted instead. As may be obvious, there’s no way to “subscribe” a thread to the posted list other than actually posting. (Remember the old-school “Posting to subscribe to the thread” posts? That would suffice.)
Directed to the group:
With the above two links, is there any point to the change I did above where I changed settings to mark threads I post to as Watching? Would it even be worth mentioning in the above mini-faq?
I would think that the default “Subscribed Threads” for discourse should be “unread”, and the fact that it includes the threads you just spend time reading would be the gee whiz new feature. I bet most people would like it, and the minority who don’t could either kick it up to 10 minutes, disable it with Never, or just use the “posted” list instead.
Meaning I needn’t have bothered even changing posted threads to default to Watching, though I think I kind of still prefer it that way. Not enough that I can positively say I would have done it if I knew then what I know now, though.
I can confirm that the site admins, for some reason, have removed unread from the topnav 
That will make it extremely difficult to get a list of the topics you’ve participated in – either by lots of reading time (see your user preferences to set the read time threshold for this), posting in them, or creating them.
(or explicitly clicking on the notification bell, of course)
It’s in the hamburger menu.
Still, it won’t be seen in the hamburger menu by most, and doesn’t show the dynamic count of unread. It should look like this:
Latest | New (9) | Unread (10) ←
Oh, that would be nice. Of course, we don’t exactly HAVE an administrator now, really.