How do you even tell if a threads updated?

AnonTwo·Sep 24, 2013·9 votes·1,543 views

There's no icon

There's no "last poster"

There's no anything as far as i can tell.

I've been clicking back to the same threads about twenty times now because there's no clarification as to whether or not it's been updated.

Who cares if a thread has 100 upvotes if noone is actually in it!?

EDIT: all i've noticed so far is the amount of comments a thread has, which means remembering a counter...lovely

Also why say when the thread was posted, and not when the last post was posted? Who cares when the thread was made vs when it was updated!?

17 Comments

ploki122Sep 24, 20136 votes

Actually, the only thing that is needed is a "Subscribe to discussion" button... that would give you updatesin your profile like it does whe nsomeone replies...

AnonTwoSep 24, 20133 votes

To be fair, often i may be interested in a thread, but not to the extent i want to know how it ends.

While a subscribe option is definitely useful, i feel it's mutually exclusive to being able to tell when a thread has been updated at first glance.

If the 'only' answer is subscribe, i worry that my list would get cluttered with a lot of junk...and then the necros....

FloreSep 25, 20131 votes

Why not an unsubscribe option with that subscribe button, when you stop caring?

AnonTwoSep 28, 20131 votes

if i've stopped caring, i'd rather be able to close and forget.

Having to both subscribe 'and' unsubscribe would make the forums far more tedious than they're worth. On the regular forums i may be visitng as many as 100 threads on a bored day.

Do i really have to hassle with both subscribe 'and' unsubscribe when the original forums made it easy to tell?

PendragonSep 25, 20136 votes

It's a huge priority for us. Totally agree that it's a gap!

Specifically we want to

Have some indication that something has changed/updated since the last time you viewed a discussion (easier of the two)
Show you what has changed (harder)

Sir FrosthavenSep 25, 20131 votes

I'm not in a huge need of knowing what has changed necessarily, but that does sound like an interesting feature. Can you elaborate on the "what" part? Would it just say something like "3 new comments since you last visited" or the like? If that's the case then you could just save the total posts in thread count to the database, and then compare it to the same data next time the page is opened - popping in some math etc.

PendragonSep 25, 20132 votes

I think you're basically spot on.

The challenge is then going to be showing you in an individual discussion what those changes are.

Sir FrosthavenSep 25, 20131 votes

The only thing that comes to my mind is keeping a running list of every 'read' comment per user by it's ID, and then when displaying a post on the screen give it a different CSS class if it's not in that list of what's been read. I could be way off on the implementation though, because it's after midnight and I'm bound to turn into a pumpkin. I guess then the question is how much overhead would a feature like that have. Good luck either way, though! Im impressed with how passionate everyone is on getting this platform going.

PendragonSep 25, 20132 votes

I don't have the tech expertise but think something along the lines of

The service should know what the last comment read in a discussion was (or the last time a discussion was read)
A list of those discussions is provided to the client when viewing a discussion
That list manifests in some way.

Two examples (there are tons more)

Something similar to the rioter comments thing that allows you to jump to each new comment
Just some visual indicator (like row highlighting) although the problem with that is stuff like... let's say there are 27 new comments in a discussion with 500+ comments. It's likely that the new ones won't be shown by default

Make sense?

Sir FrosthavenSep 25, 20131 votes

Crystal clear! Thanks for the response :)

PendragonSep 25, 20132 votes

Any time! We're also open to any other ideas you might have to tack the issue

Sir FrosthavenSep 25, 20131 votes

Alright! I'll keep going as I do with overloading you guys with suggestions <3

Sir FrosthavenSep 26, 20131 votes

So I've been giving this a little thought, and one way you could impliment a surface level notifier for unread content is using cookies similar to the way vBulletin used. It'd work like this:

User clicks a thread link. the thread identifier and the number of comments is saved to a cookie ('threadidentifier123213|2comments' for example).
Whenever the thread view page is loaded, and when the "show more" button is clicked on said page, a javascript will scan each visible thread entry and parse the saved comment total from the variable setup in step one. If the comments are higher, apply the "new comments" styling to the entry.
You'd want to limit the total number of value-pairs that can be saved to this cookie to prevent meeting the cookie variable ceiling.

Just as a note, this method would give you the "new content" feature with almost no overhead cost. The one fallback is that it would not be a reliable way to show WHAT has changed other than the comment total. You could use this system in conjunction with a more robust data parsing system though, as it's very light weight!

If you'd like to know how it would actually work, I can spend some time tomorrow when I get home to create a userscript that adds the functionality~

BattleCrewserSep 25, 20131 votes

Have you guys looked at the changes that FEK makes to the original forums? I believe you guys should see what they did in that before you completely change everything

Sir FrosthavenSep 24, 20134 votes

I can agree with this. I'd rather a notice that says "updated about 2 hours ago" than be told that it was created about 2 hours ago. If they tweak the layout there would be plenty of room to show both, imo :)

ModCaptainMårvelousSep 25, 20131 votes

One of the things they really want to do is a subscription button for, say, writing/drawing/etc threads and maybe content creators. So basically now you can keep track of those you really wanna follow.