All Discussions with new messages: overwhelming

Fastidious

I am finding extremely distracting---or, dare I say, stressing---coming to a Flarum forum and seeing many new discussions under "All discussions" (the default view). This gets worse if they crossed the threshold of "Load more." Am I alone on this?

I am not sure which approach to recommend.

Toby

On the original topic:

Fastidious I am finding extremely distracting---or, dare I say, stressing---coming to a Flarum forum and seeing many new discussions under "All discussions" (the default view). This gets worse if they crossed the threshold of "Load more." Am I alone on this?

No, I agree completely! luceos's use of the word "overwhelming" is very apt.

I was thinking about this this morning and had an idea ... What if we make it so:

Discussions with unread posts are not bold, but are a normal weight and color, like read discussions are currently.
Discussions with no unread posts are greyed out somewhat, so they draw less attention.
Only followed discussions with unread posts are bolded.

luceos

I also tend to press the read all button first and then see what I'd like to have missed.. I'm not sure how this feeling arose, but I do tend to have the same indication as you on this. What would happen on a very, very active community. Let's say a stack overflow site? Holy crap.

Overwelmed is a good description yes.

Dominion

I used to worry about this at first, but I think I've made my peace with it.

The only real difference between this way of doing things and the conventional forum interface is that the latter can will only show you one updated discussion per forum in the default view. So in order to check the latest forums, you have to click a forum and wait for it to load; then go back to the top, click another forum and wait for that one to load; and so on, ad nauseam.

I've come to realize that I really didn't enjoy that process ... it's probably one of the main reasons I've never been a very avid forum user. With Flarum, at least, I get the latest updates without all that clicking. Granted, reloading the forum in the morning and seeing a ton of bold threads can be a bit, well, daunting. But I think it's better than knowing there are a ton of updated threads out there that I can't see without clicking around for them.

One way to alleviate your concerns might be to add a feature that's in esoTalk, but not in Flarum yet: the ability to mute tags that one isn't interested in, so they don't show up in the All Discussions list. I wonder if anyone has brought that feature up yet?

luceos

Dominion i was thinking about favorite tags the moment i read your sentence about muted tags.. I seriously think this should be done.

Toby

Dominion One way to alleviate your concerns might be to add a feature that's in esoTalk, but not in Flarum yet: the ability to mute tags that one isn't interested in, so they don't show up in the All Discussions list. I wonder if anyone has brought that feature up yet?

There's an issue for that! 😃

Dominion

If @Fastidious has no objections, we could change the title on this thread and tag it with Features.

I did a quick search, and it looks like no one has brought this up yet. It's certainly a needed feature.

Fastidious

Dominion change at will.

I am far from warm to the whole tag idea--and this relates to the topic, but it sidetracks a bit. Sadly that is what @Toby chose to use on Flarum.

Nulled

Also, I would be cool to sort read/unread , with unread a the top (date based decreasing) and the read at the bottom, like some mailbox 🙂

Franz

Fastidious Well, it's only an extension; alternative setups can be created equally. And maybe one day it will even find its way into the Flarum package.

Dominion

How's that?

Dominion

Toby Great! I didn't think to search for "ignore". (I usually associate that word with users, not tags.)

luceos

Toby

There's an issue for that! 😃

It's not an issue, it's a feature! 😉

Dominion

Toby Though I've felt the need less than others, that sounds to me like it would help quite a bit.

In case you haven't seen it yet, I've added a couple ideas to the issue you linked above about the possibilities of using the favorites feature to accomplish something like the muting you had in esoTalk. It's a much more drastic approach than what you suggest, but you might be able to combine them.

luceos

Toby Only followed discussions with unread posts are bolded.

I would guess it would make sense to also include your own threads and threads with your posts in that? Or should that be configurable?

Dominion

Toby
Discussions with unread posts are not bold, but are a normal weight and color, like read discussions are currently.
Discussions with no unread posts are greyed out somewhat, so they draw less attention.
Only followed discussions with unread posts are bolded.

I thought it sounded neat at first. But after pondering for a while, I've been having second thoughts.

We've already got the star badge thingie to distinguish between followed and non-followed posts.
Whether a post is read or not is also a binary distinction.
Greying out posts seems more appropriate to something like locked or deleted threads.

What you suggest would make the All Discussions list less ... oppressive, if you will. But it does so by giving thread titles three states where two should be enough. I'm afraid that will be less intuitive than what we've got at the moment.

Maybe we should step back and consider whether there are other, less obtrusive ways of indicating whether a thread is read or not. Icons, background color, font variation ... I dunno ... there has to be something. (This might also be a good idea from the perspective that bold type might not work as well for some languages as it does for others; though in the end that's something that may need to be dealt with by the localizer.)

Fastidious

Toby I think the approach you propose will work much better than current. I would only add one thing and that is adding bolding too, perhaps, to those conversations in which I participated, and have new posts, or make it so when someone participates in a conversation, they auto-follow it by default.

Dominion

luceos There's an issue for that too! (Or is that not what you meant?)

Dominion

Fastidious Regarding that one thing, please see the issue I linked for luceos above.

luceos

Dominion luceos There's an issue for that too! (Or is that not what you meant?)

Yes, didn't know.

Toby

Dominion Greying out posts seems more appropriate to something like locked or deleted threads.

Perhaps ... but on the other hand, one could argue that usually a thread is only of interest to you if it contains new posts, and therefore that state should be associated with the "normal" font style. Everything else is less important and thus should be less prominent than "normal".

It's worth mentioning that this is also the approach that Discourse takes.

Anyway, I've switched over the styles on this forum so we can give it a go. Note that I haven't made a third bold state for followed posts – Dominion makes a good point that three states are less intuitive than two. Also note that if we went ahead with this change, we would want all titles to still be black for visitors who aren't logged in, not grey like they are now ... but that would involve some changes to the code, which is why I haven't bothered for now.

Thoughts?

Dominion

luceos No worries!

Readjusting the title and tagging, since the discussion has widened back to the original topic presented by @Fastidious