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.
To be honest, I don’t view the Latest | New (9) | Unread (10) ← links to be reliably available because once you scroll down they’re no longer there, and thanks to infinte scroll without even an infinite scroll bar, there’s no way to no how many page reloads (ugh) you’d need to get back to those links.
I view the hamburger menu as the only viable on-screen source to use for navigation. The top links may as well not even be there as far as I’m concerned.
Speaking of the hamburger menu, I don’t know if it’s customizable but boy howdy would I love it if “Posted” were an option. There’s a blank, unused space it could drop right into…
Discourse is a JavaScript app so a page “reload” isn’t really a reload in the traditional sense; the app reaches out and grabs the necessary data rather than re-rendering the entire page from scratch. So going back via the back button will be quite speedy.
In general the way I read most sites is via the New and Unread lists, as well as Suggested Topics at the bottom of the topic, which is prioritized to show unread (topics you are tracking/watching aka “subscribed to” with new posts) first.
Maybe the admins did delete it, I’ve no idea. I’m still seeing “categories new latest top” but no ‘unread’ even when there are definitely unread posts in threads I’ve posted in and have set to ‘tracking’.
– There are threads I’ve never read because I’ve no interest in them, so ‘new’ apparently isn’t ever going to go away for me. (That’s not a problem, it’s just a comment.)[quote=“EllisDee, post:58, topic:919602”]
A: Use the link https://boards.straightdope.com/unread.
[/quote]
Thanks!
And thanks again.
– I’m puzzled as to why at least one thread with new posts is showing up in my ‘posted’ page but not in my ‘unread’ page. I’d think if anything it woul be the other way around, that the ‘unread’ page should include everything that shows on the ‘posted page’ plus some additional pages that I didn’t post to but ‘watched’ anyway. But instead each page seems to show me some threads missed by the other, meaning that I’d have to check both of them to accomplish what I want.
I mean in the sense of pausing the browser and cluttering browser history with a new entry. If I’ve infinite scrolled down 3 times into Cafe Society, for example, how would I then get back to the top links? (That’s an actual question. Would Ctrl+Home do it in one?) I can immediately and always click the hamburger menu without even a javascript fetch.
Just in general, I almost never use my browser’s back button because I almost exclusive open links as new tabs. Especially on any discussion website where I post messages I would I never hit the back button, as I always considered the back button a potential double-post hazard and so got in the habit of never using it or even trusting it on message boards.
Very similar with me, actually. I almost exclusively use New Posts as my main entry on most discussion boards I frequent. (Sports team boards, videogame boards, etc…)
But not here. The SDMB is far too sprawling for a New Posts feature to be useful to me. It’s a (much) smaller scale but similar to as if you went to reddit and got a list of ALL new posts to ANY reddit as opposed to just the subreddits you participate in.
Right, but with Discourse defaults, topics are only considered new for 2 days after creation. And you can press the dismiss new button on the new page to clear all your new topics if you want.
Oh yeah, I get that the feature functions. I’m saying I don’t have a use for the feature on a large, general interest message board.
Like, when I go to a Giants messageboard, New Posts all the way. Or, say, back when I played Dungeons & Dragons Online, whose discussion board inexplicably has like 50 different forums, New Posts for sure.
But there is pretty much never a time when I want a single list of all new threads for all the SDMB forums I didn’t mute. (Love the forum mute, btw!) That’s just not how my brain works. Every post on the giants boards is about the giants. Every post on the DDO forums is about DDO. Single topic, so New Posts totally makes sense.
But on the dope, it’s rare that I’m in the mood to open more than one forum in any given session. Usually I either go to Game Room or Cafe Society, occasionally both, and rarely I peek into MPSIMS, IMHO, and The Pit. Frequently my entire visit is just to the Quarantine Zone for news and updates.
I am pretty much never in the mood to browse threads from ALL (non-muted) forums on the dope. That’s just never a thing I’m looking for because there’s just too much.
I’ve almost given up on the “back button” on this site because I never know where I will end up. It has some different gestalt of place than I have.
Or… maybe I’m just frustrated that if I read a thread, move on, and then realize I want to check something again in the thread, or maybe even respond to it, that I have a LOT of trouble finding it again. It’s no longer unread… so… it just disappears.
If I can guess what category it was in I might be able to find it that way, but it always seems to take me several clicks to get to the list of categories. I’m sure there are better ways of navigating the site than what I do. Hopefully I will eventually learn them. But I’m still pretty frustrated about not being able to find stuff.
Anyway, I pretty much only use the hamburger menu right now, because that’s the only one that doesn’t surprise me in unwanted ways.
I overthought this; let me rephrase:
Sometimes when I come to the dope it’s because I’m looking to read about covid. Other times I’m looking to bullshit about sports or tv/movies, or occassionally both, as an escape from the world of covid.
Neither time do I want New Posts because it’ll either intrude on my virus updates or remind me of the virus while I’m trying to escape from it.
Hope that makes sense.
Different people use this board really differently, so it’s not surprising that some features work for some and not for others.
I rarely even know what forum/category I’m in. I’m interested in things in multiple forums, and have made posts in nearly all of them; so I almost never look at an individual category – once in a while if I’m trying to look for something and have an idea what category it’s likely to be in; or if I’m going to start a thread, which seems easiest, or maybe only possible, to do from a category page.
Occasionally I do need to check whether a thread’s in the Pit, either before deciding how or if to post something, or deciding whether to report something.
I don’t open anywhere near all the threads. I just skim past thread titles I’m not interested in at all, or not interested in at the moment. But I’m nearly always reading on a large screen desktop, and can go through a long list pretty fast – I’d find it very awkward to be trying to read the Dope on a phone, even if my phone weren’t a tiny screened flip phone.
If it was something you read recently (say in the last 5 topics you were in), the back button should get you there kinda naturally. But getting back to a topic you read, say, 10-20 topics ago… that’s a tough one.
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If you posted in the topic, you can view or search your recent posts to find it. I do this all the time. Note that posting in a topic will subscribe you to that topic (we call this “notification level” … and we also call them “topics”, since there’s no real threading in Discourse by design).
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If you only read the topic, there’s currently no way in Discourse to say “show me the last 20 topics I entered”, but it’s an interesting feature idea.
Kind of like how Amazon will (in some scenarios, I know I have seen it but I can’t get it to come up while visiting Amazon or a product on Amazon right now) sometimes show you a list of the last (x) products you browsed.
You can also use the bookmark feature (which optionally includes a timer reminder), if you click or tap … then 
the bookmark glyph, but that presupposes that you know you want to come back to the topic, which may not be true in this case. 
Aha, I found it on Amazon finally, “your browsing history”. It’s absolutely buried at the bottom of the Amazon page for a given product, just above the footer.
What’s weird about this is that yes, I did browse those products, but quite a while ago, and most (but not all?) of the “browsed” products were purchased? So strange. The URL for it is
https://www.amazon.com/gp/history/ref=pd_pyml_rhf
Right, you can also view new topics per category, note that the New (x) count will change when you enter a category to reflect only the new topics in that category.
Yeah, I can follow threads. I’m not sure I’ve figured out how to bookmark them. Maybe I’m just scatterbrained, but it’s fairly common for me to read a bit of a thread, and then get distracted, poke at something else, and then think, “actually, that was interesting, I’d like to read it now”. But then I can’t find it. I suppose it’s because I tend to use the “unread” button, and in vBulletin things in that menu stay there for a while, and just change color to indicate they’ve been read. And that’s what I’m used to. So when they disappear off the face of the earth in Discourse, I find it very frustrating. It just makes me feel ungrounded, and lost, and disoriented.
It seems like such a small difference from vBulletin. But there you have it.
I guess I’ll try repeatedly clicking the back button. If that works it will make me happier.
Yes, that also happens here – the light grey color of the title indicates you’ve read the topic to the end.
In the above screenshot (I am viewing the Site Feedback category), I have read “very happy with Discourse” and “Never successfully…” to completion, so they are light grey. The other topics are black indicating I have not read them to completion.
You can also see 2 new unread replies in a topic I have subscribed to “Darn you, new mobile Firefox”, in this case because I replied to the topic.
Why is there no mouseover in Sam’s Simple Theme?
There’s no mouseover if you have a touchscreen. 
unless you use the hamburger menu. Then they don’t go gray, they just disappear.
I think you were responding to me…
I don’t have a touchscreen. The mouseover works in other themes. It’s been disabled in Sam’s Simple.