Alicornutopia

I'm confused about what you mean, Ade - what button got co-opted?

I think "refresh" would ordinarily mean "load the content I'm looking at again", not "load the next page of content".

That feels like an awfully skewed way of looking at it, "the website decided to co-opt the button", if so. It didn't, you're just not on the page you expected to be on (and can probably get to it quite easily by clicking a permalink).

But yes, as Marri says, I think the main issue was having to figure out the unread reply ID for each of those posts. And it could be weird behavior if it starts going to unread as of page load instead of truly the unread page, which would probably bug me.

Ezra wrote:I think "refresh" would ordinarily mean "load the content I'm looking at again", not "load the next page of content".

This, yes. That's literally what 'refresh' means - 'this thing, but fresher'.

Like, if there are edits to a tag, and I'm looking at the unedited version of that tag, 'refresh' should - always, without me having to think about how I navigated there - show me the edits. Right now if I do that, even if I don't end up on a new page, I'm liable to lose my place, which is also not what that button is supposed to do.

This thing, here, is the unread page of the post, not the unread page the first time you looked at the page in that tab.

(I edited my post above while you were posting.)

... It seems like it'd be hard to draw an appropriate distinction over whether a page is supposed to update based on external data or not, looking at it as "it should show me exactly what was there before except newer" and trying to use that to decide what it should do. In this case the behavior might be confusing, but if someone specifically wanted a link to the last page of a post, they could literally want it to always link to the last page, or if we're even talking about, say, the unread posts list - that should presumably update the order and the content based on whether you've read the posts in the meantime, and not just update the timestamps when you refresh.

So it seems more sensible to look at it as "I expected to be taken to the page that I had had unread at the time of loading, and then not to move from there unless I click the pagination" instead of "the site co-opted the button". In this sense, I look at it as "I was literally on the post with my page set to unread, so clearly if I reload it will take me elsewhere", meaning I did not consider this behavior very confusing and adapted my habits to clicking the permalink button without ever having encountered this problem.

Unbitwise wrote:

Yes, it's so people can just refresh the page and automatically be looking at the most recent unread.

That's exactly the part I don't want. I want refreshing to give me "updated view of this page" not "the next page! surprise!"

Ezra wrote:I think "refresh" would ordinarily mean "load the content I'm looking at again", not "load the next page of content".

This is how that button works on just about the entire rest of the internet, and the exceptions are generally either obviously exotic cases on the site in question (the main way of getting to the bit of a thread I want to read should not be an exotic case that I have to think about extra) or sites that have seriously sketchy design in general - in all other cases it's got a specific and very consistent function. (Dynamic lists change more than most things, of course. This is like looking out the window and seeing what the current weather or time of day is. If I look out the window and the entire scene has changed, something is still wrong.)

Throne3d wrote:...adapted my habits to clicking the permalink button...

Yes, I've done this too. But I've also stopped using the refresh button on thread pages at all; I can get my brain to handle 'the refresh button does what it does, except on some pages it's broken'; if I ask it to handle 'the refresh button usually does this, but on some pages it does this other thing instead, depending on this context that I don't otherwise have to pay attention to at all', the result is unpleasant flailing, including on other websites where I end up getting confused about which thing it will do. And having to remember that it is 'broken' on a given type of page is still annoying mental overhead.

In that case @marri and @throne wouldn't it be possible to make the "unread" page link to a place that calculates the newest unread reply and then redirects to it, the same way a bit.ly link redirects to an actual page rather than staying as a bit.ly address on the address bar?

Adelene wrote:This is how that button works on just about the entire rest of the internet, and the exceptions are generally either obviously exotic cases on the site in question (the main way of getting to the bit of a thread I want to read should not be an exotic case that I have to think about extra) or sites that have seriously sketchy design in general - in all other cases it's got a specific and very consistent function.

This site fails the test – if you click the unread button on a post and then reload, you are taken to the next page when there is a next page. It goes to &view=unread#unread. I suppose this site has a vaguely sketchy design though, and it failing here doesn't necessarily mean it should fail elsewhere.

Adelene wrote:Yes, I've done this too. But I've also stopped using the refresh button on thread pages at all

This seems weird because I use the reload button all the time by just making sure to tap permalink after using an unread link.

pedromvilar wrote:In that case @marri and @throne wouldn't it be possible to make the "unread" page link to a place that calculates the newest unread reply and then redirects to it, the same way a bit.ly link redirects to an actual page rather than staying as a bit.ly address on the address bar?

I think this came up sometime before and someone gave a reason not to simply redirect, and I don't remember what it is or why it was but it makes me wary to just go ahead and do it. To my knowledge, not many places do that. If we did this I would probably want it to be a toggle. This whole thing is bugging me for no apparent reason and it's quite inconvenient but I apologize for seeming inflexible.