Comment on Introducing the unified new view for the topic list
awesomerobot@meta.discourse.org 1 day ago Never say never! There are various settings that can change this by site or account, but the defaults are:
- New: a topic that was created within the past 2 days that you haven’t opened yet
- Unread: topics you’ve already read that have new replies
- Unseen: topics you’ve never read at any point (hidden by default, a bit of a niche case)
The hope with the combined new is that the labels topics/replies are a little more intuitive than figuring out the difference between new/unread
I think “new” are not necessarily topics from the past 2 days. There is a user preference where you can configure which topics appear in new
Similarly, unread only shows topics you are tracking or watching that have new replies (there is a preference for automatically tracking topics after some time of reading; there is also one for tracking/watching on reply, and when creating the topic, you can track/watch all topics with a tag or in a category, and you can manually edit the topic tracking status of each topic).
So I get why it’s complicated. Especially the fact that not all new replies are in unread.
I think it also helped that this was explained on the pages of /new and /unread. Since those aren’t hidden for new users when they are empty, this used to be a great place to learn how these lists work.
It just felt like a lot of text to show all the time to users just because they have an empty list, regardless of whether a user account was 1 day old or 10 years old…this is what we show now:
But there is probably a middle ground, like maybe we could show more info if the user account isn’t very old, or we could add more info in a tooltip? @awesomerobot WDYT?
Overall we still have to do more work on user tips/new user education, hopefully at some point we can get to this.
I think your post would better fit into the topic I quoted than into this topic.
Since /new and /unread are hidden from the navigation if they are empty I never felt like seeing those all the time.