If you click on a thread, the forum marks it as “read” (greyed out). But it only does this if (a) you’ve scrolled to the last post and (b) you keep the post in view for I think two seconds.
(a) is fine; that’s how I want it to keep track.
(b) been low-key annoying me for years. Very often I pop open a thread, check to see if there’s anything I need to pay attention to, and then click elsewhere. This takes me less than two seconds! I read fast. Then the thread is still marked unread, and I come back the next day and pop it open again, say “Whoops I read this already”, close it, repeat…
(Really what I usually do is cmd-click to pop open the thread in a new window, scroll down, close the thread window, and then cmd-click on the next thread. This works the same way: it marks the thread as read if I keep the window open for a couple of seconds. But this is a tedious delay from my point of view. I’m just sitting there waiting.)
Is there a way to tweak or eliminate this time delay? I assume it’s there in case of misclicks, but that’s not a problem I have.
Auto-tracking I believe can be defeated if you go to your preferences and choose “Automatically track topics I enter - never”? I was able to do this, but it won’t retroactively reset tracking on posts you’ve entered before you’ve set it to never.
Discourse has very specific ideas and methods about their software. As people have noted “unread” means something a lot different to Discourse than what most people expect it to mean. If you’ve read an entire topic the title will dim in the list, and I do not believe there’s away to dim every topic.
People’s Champion - The blue dot means this is a “new” topic based on my “consider topics new when” setting.
Trouble Installing - This topic is older than two days (my setting) and I’ve never entered it so no blue dot. The topic title text is bright because it’s “new” to me. One might say “unread” but as with all things Discourse, it’s complicated.
Question about posts being marked as read - I’ve read all the posts so the topic title is dimmed.
When are descriptions/Time Travel - I’ve posted replies or spent enough time in these topics that “tracking” is turned on automatically based on my settings, thus I’m shown an unread post count for the topic.
Sorry if there isn’t a very clear answer to to this and it sounds like waffling when we answer a question, but Discourse philosophy can be opaque. Sometimes what seems like a simple answer will get Discourse Meta answers from the devs like this.
And more specifically to Zarf’s post, the slight delay when you scroll to the bottom of a topic to mark it “read” so it dims and updates tracking indications isn’t a setting; I believe it’s just server/software delay as the back-end catches up in real time. It’s similar to how you can click a notification and read what it pertains to but the notification might take a while to go away even when resolved.
If you quick-mouse wheel down through an entire topic and then back-button out, the software may not have had time to “notice” you did that and fail to mark the topic since the server is basically chasing behind you and marking each individual post read.
One tip: You can click the timer at the bottom of the timeline that shows last post recency to jump to the last post which seems to consistently mark the topic read.
I’m pretty convinced that there’s a javascript delay in the handling there. But if it’s buried and there’s no config setting for it, then that’s the way it is.
You can click the timer at the bottom of the timeline that shows last post recency to jump to the last post which seems to consistently mark the topic read.
That is useful, but yoinking the mouse around to find that button is still more of a roadblock than (click thread) (cmd-W) (click thread) (cmd-W).
I think it’s weird that clicking on a thread doesn’t mark that post as read. You don’t need an extra server interaction to do that; you just contacted the server to fetch the post! I guess the idea is that the watch-the-scroll-position daemon already exists, so everything might as well rely on it.
cmd W closes the tab unless there is only one tab open, in which case it closes the window (but not the application). cmd Q closes the application and all corresponding windows. It’s the equivalent of ctrl W and ctrl Q on non-Apple devices.
On a related topic, here is another bug with the website’s interface: on mobile if you click a user it opens a popup showing the user and it greys out the background, but if you then drag the background it closes the popup but doesn’t un-grey the background again.
