The Glowfic Constellation

[Throne3d]

If you were just confronted with "this post has been hidden from your unread list" on non-unread pages, would that impact the functionality of this feature or just be suboptimal (since you don't care about that information)?

It seems like people who want it not having it [eg me if no change is applied] is a lack of usability, but people who don't want it having it [eg you if such a change is applied] is clutter.

I would prefer to know on all lists I look at whether I hid a post or not, not just a filtered version of the unread list. Just having filtering seems awkward to access the information, as I have to look at a post list, figure out which of the posts I care about knowing if I've ignored, locating them in the unread list – not much aided by a filter – and then using that information. Alternatively I could filter the post list for just hidden posts, but then this doesn't let me see them side by side, plus it requires we have our filtering on more of the site, and this seems like it will be annoying to figure out the interactions for when board sections are involved.

[Unbitwise]

I think there's some confusion. My hypothesis is:

Throne3d is thinking people are asking for "don't give any indication a post is 'hidden' when it appears in other lists".

Other people are saying "I don't want posts to be actually hidden in other lists".

Yes?

[Throne3d]

I was proposing they be marked like on the reports page. That is, they be at 30% opacity. (This may be so low as to be annoying? It could be tweaked for other lists or made some more preferably value generally.) Hiding them would in fact annoy me, as it doesn't let me see them side by side when I want to (see previous complaint).

Edit: that is to say yes you have my side of things right. (The original thing I said about this specifically mentioned they still have a link.)

[pedromvilar]

All i want is to be able to treat the MWF like a forum and not have it appear in my Unread or tags owed :P

[Kappa]

I think it is fine if "hidden from unread page" is a status that is visibly marked when the thread appears in other locations, but I prefer that the "hidden from unread page" status does not make the thread's own unread status behave abnormally in any way, e.g. by marking it read when you hide/unhide it or anything like that. That is the aspect of pedro's suggestion that I was trying to +1.

[Throne3d]

@Pedro: that doesn't help us come to a solution for this particular item, though. Do you actively prefer that hidden posts not be marked in any way on other post lists? Would it inconvenience you (1) not at all really, (2) a bit, (3) quite a bit or (4) very much a lot?

@Everyone: same goes for anybody else who doesn't like the idea. If you're inconvenienced enough and don't hate the idea, it can probably be made into an account option to display them differently or not.

@Kappa: thanks.

Proposal to change current read-progress-wrt-hidden-threads functionality

@Others, cc Kappa: do people care to have hidden posts not get marked read when you look at them? (Current functionality means that if you read a hidden post you're ignored. If nobody cares for this behavior it can probably be altered and fix part of this problem.)

Also yes, marking a post as unhidden (or maybe hidden? one of the two, this is pending investigation) will mark it read. (Issue #148)

Problems with how people want the MWF on the Constellation

@Pedro and others: you can have the board not appear in your Unread by hiding it, which has issues when you go to read it, and it not appearing in your Tags Owed either gets it hardcoded or is pending the planned fix to allow people to hide threads from tags owed to be implemented (issue 87, relies on authorship of posts being messed around with).

In case anybody wishes to complain about or finds that the bulk of their problem is due to the "authors" column being messed up by MWF threads, there is a pull request to shorten 4+ author-lists into "User1 and X others" [with User1 being the author of the first post] instead of being "User1, User2, User3, User4, …" [alphabetically, all of them]. The "X others" part of the text is made into a link to a post's stats page which shows the rest of the authors.

More UI stuff for post lists

@People who care about the post list UI: if this reminds you that you're unhappy you can't reach the stats page without going through the post itself (or hoping it has a ton of authors post-proposed-change), there is another issue for that (#71) which also encompasses showing favorited status on post lists and to be honest should probably cover the visibility status and a lot of it requires that we have suggestions for UI. It presumably doesn't go in the list with the content warnings, as that'd make it harder to tell if a post has content warnings? Where does it go. Do we put a (stats) or a ([little stats icon]) link/button after a post title? does it go before the authors list always? does it appear near the "updated at" timestamp? does it get its own column at the end?

That pesky unread arrow (aka: mobile users, We Are Sorry™)

@Everybody: how much do people care about how the post title text currently flows around the unread arrow? If nobody cares at all, that can be put into another column so mobile users are finally happy that inconvenience is less inconvenient.

That pesky mobile interface when reading a post (aka: mobile users, We Have Not Touched This In Like A Year™)

@Mobile users: the UI should probably be improved so it's less ugly on mobile. This is what I'm currently using on my own mobile device (ignore the fact the font is different) because I got fed up with the display and hacked it briefly with Stylish. The icon is not intentionally separated but it seemed hard to keep it attached with the HTML as it is at present and while not using some ~fancy modern CSS techniques~ (ie flexbox) that are ~not supported on any old browsers~!

Browsers and NoScript

@People who care: Relatedly, we do not know what browsers we care about (#86). We can probably get a list of all the browsers used on the site in the past month? Does anybody want a special request or to (hopefully facetiously) suggest we support (eg) IE. Also, if you use NoScript, you are also currently not well supported (#48) because Rails and HTTP verbs make things hard to deal with. I doubt people have good suggestions there. We could do an ugly red banner to let you know to enable it.

End

Okay I think I'm done for now. Any feedback on the mess of this would be nice, since a lot of this we [or at least I] do not know what to do about. If there were a nicer way for me to not overload people with words while still getting feedback, that'd be nice.

[Kappa]

Proposal to change current read-progress-wrt-hidden-threads functionality

@Others, cc Kappa: do people care to have hidden posts not get marked read when you look at them? (Current functionality means that if you read a hidden post you're ignored. If nobody cares for this behavior it can probably be altered and fix part of this problem.)

Also yes, marking a post as unhidden (or maybe hidden? one of the two, this is pending investigation) will mark it read. (Issue #148)

I prefer it if "hide from unread page" means "this post does not show up on the unread page" but does not affect the behaviour of the post's unread status otherwise, so if you're reading the post you see all the same unread-related behaviours as you would if it showed up on the unread page, except that it does not show up on the unread page because it is hidden from it.

I do not care whether "hidden from unread page" is a visibly marked status elsewhere.

I find the quoted text somewhat unclear so I'm not sure if I have answered your question.

[Throne3d]

You have, if I'm understanding you correctly.

- The current behavior where posts are explicitly not marked read because you have ignored them should be removed (this is specifically written into the code, "@Others, cc Kappa" etc), i.e. marking a post ignored and then reading it should in fact update where you have read up to.
- The broken behavior where marking a post hidden/unhidden changes how much of it you have read should be fixed (this is weird behavior from the implementation of these things, "Also yes" etc). I think most / all people would agree on this.
- You don't care about how they show up in non-unread post lists ("@Pedro: that doesn't" etc).

[Unbitwise]

do people care to have hidden posts not get marked read when you look at them?

It doesn't matter to me but I think it makes sense that hiddenness is orthogonal to reading position.

That said, you've inspired me to ask for a thing: a user preference that disables auto-marking-things-read. This would be, for me, for temporary use when I'm digging around threads trying to find something (that I remember, or that people are talking about) without "losing my place".

can't reach the stats page without going through the post itself … Where does it go.

Linking to stats: “obvious” neatly-tucked-away place to put it is to linkify the number of posts.

Also, it would be neat if the stats page (which really ought to be renamed; if nothing else it is more like "metadata" or "title page" or "the copyright page of a book" than "stats") contained at the bottom or something a DW-flat-view style of links to every single page of the thread. For mobile users, this gives us a jump-to-page possibility; it also allows making use of browser visited-link display to find out that notion of what have I read (which is sometimes interesting, e.g. if I am rereading, or I somehow jumped into the middle and want to go back to the beginning).

Your hacked up mobile view is very nice! If I were tweaking it to my taste, I would get rid of the margins at the top between the headerstuff and the reply's box (again, making it more like DW flat view), and remove entirely the post timestamps (I never look at them and they're OOC information too!).

Browser/noscript support: I am of the opinion that it should always be possible to read threads in [insert arbitrary ridiculous but not actually broken browser here]. But it's okay if any and all logged-in-user functionality (posting, customization) is nonfunctional and stuff is ugly. Progressive enhancement is the current buzzword for the more precisely defined version of the thing that I am vaguely waving at.

[Alicorn]

Feature request: "show all page numbers".