New Topic Grids

Is it possible to bookmark the 'New Posts' page, so it always comes up as 'All Forums'? It seems to default as 'My Forums'.

The preference should stay, once you select it.

For me, for whatever reason, that is not happening.

At the moment, it seems to default to 'All Forums' showing. If I click that and 'My Forums' comes up, then close the window, the other way comes up again, and not the new change.

I've cleared my cache, and still the same.

Ok, I'll have to look into that. We have some work to do on that preference (and that filter) anyway.

As for the folks who don't like the unread sorting, we have an existing preference to undo it (just not exposed to UI and we need to find a clean way to do that) so there will likely be an option to turn it off in the near future.

Snap, well there's a good reason if I ever heard one.

Cycloptichorn

Hi Robert!

The E-mail alert to new posts, etc, appears to have been resolved.
Thank you for your help and assistance (so quickly too) with this.

Have a brilliant weekend, Sir.

Mark...

When I click on New Posts or New Topics, there are old threads there that haven't been responded to in a while. Why are they coming up under New? They're not new.

Example:

The topics below have not received a reply since you logged out or read the topic.
12

Not trying to sound cheap, but...
Forums: Walgreens, Shopping, Coupons, Cheap, Salespeople
Discussion by chai2
Posted 06/23/10 7:22 PMReplies: 49
Views: 632
Last Post by Setanta
on 06/24/10 2:40 PM

How new is New? Yesterday (as in Chai's post in my question above)? An hour ago? Since I last logged in?

Last Post by Setanta
on 06/24/10 2:40 PM

That's not new but it's at the top of the page when I click New Topics. It's not a new topic and it hasn't even been responded to since two days ago.

Your my topics (they are based on your voting) don't seem very useful and are filtering out topics you are interested in (you must vote an awful lot of topics down for this to have happened), in your case I'd switch that to all topics (for now click the all topics link at the top of the list, later this will be made different and clearer). Alternately, you can visit your favorite forums and "add" them (link at top under title) and their topics will show up on that view.

Okay, thanks. Yes, I vote down a lot.

Edit: Robert, I only ever click on New Posts and New Topics, not My Topics (well, only when I want to find an older one). But I don't see "All Topics" anywhere...

Popular • My Friends • My Topics • My Posts • My Tags • New Topics • New Posts • Unanswered

Where is All Topics?

Well if we get this filter right, it might be good for your usecase then (if you don't want to see all those topics you vote down that is). With my voting history what that does is completely eliminate all the topics I'm not interested in (meaning I'd not have to vote them down) and it works well. In your case I may be able to improve how it works a bit, but I think you'd need to add forums you like for it to work well.

But the end result is supposed to be to show you fewer of the topics you'd want to vote down, and I bet if you turn it on you don't see ANY (the problem in your case is that it is not showing you enough of the stuff you DO want, which is due to rare forums being at the top of your my forums list).

It's at the top of the list on the new posts page. Right now the link toggles between "my forums" (when it displays this it means you are currently on all topics, and that will switch) and "all topics".

This particular bit of UI will change to something more usable soon so if these instructions aren't valid in a day or so this is why.

I've heard little about the move from "paragraphical" topic listings to more "tabular" ones (basically how details are in columns). This was actually just done as an afterthought addition to our grid work and isn't very polished but I'd be interested in knowing if members prefer this kind of direction with the topic grid (towards columns basically).

Makes no difference to me at all.

Okay, thank you. I see it's a toggle - didn't know that. Now it's good.

It doesn't bother me to see all the Topic Voted Down lines and only two or three topics remaining. It's easier on the eyes to see TVD repeatedly rather than reading through the myriad of game titles, relationship questions, etc.

No offense to anyone, I just don't need to have to read and scroll through all those titles.

That's why we made the filter, if you turn that filter on, based on your voting history those forums are hidden from you. The problem is that we aren't showing enough forums that you do want with the current way it is built (so I have some changes planned).

Once the filter is tweaked, the idea is for it to basically have done the voting for you, and the signal-to-noise ratio for you should be a lot better. But your voting pattern seems to have made it a bit less useful than it should be, so we have more work to do there and I'd keep it on all topics for now.

Yes, I'll keep them all on for now, especially since I don't know what 'filter' you're talking about. This enables one to turn off an entire forum/category?

Yes, on each forum page (right now under the header) there are links to add/remove the forum. Forums are also automatically added/removed based on voting history.

So you can go to a forum you don't want to see anymore, and remove it or go to a forum you want to see and add it. Then with the filter running you'll see more of what you do want and less of what you don't. But it needs some pretty big tweaks right now to be more useful than it is.

I probably thumb down at least half of the threads that are tagged with politics so that forum would disappear unless I went in to "add" it?

Then I'd see them all, and continue to thumb down the particular threads I'm not interested in - is that about right?

Right now yes, this (the way the filter works) is in a state of flux though and may change as we iterate and tweak it to the real-world data.

Edit: I should note that we are only displaying your top X, but we are actually using about 1000 right now as the total. We'll work on getting deeper management of them more transparent to users.