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Originally posted by Deviant Ollam
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Presently, "recent activity" is per post, with most recent at the top.
i can never seem to get the "mark all forums read" link to do anything, so my "unread content" is always a bazillion pages long. and yet it still somehow seems to NOT show lots of entries that i see if i check the "recent activity" link.
and, as described before by me, both of these yield highly less-than-useful results. they display by-post as opposed to by-thread. to repeat my previous statement...
Click unread posts, click on the first result, read the posts that follow (or don't) and then click again on "unread posts" and ALL of the posts under that thread previously listed are no in the results of unread posts.
If we do this per-thread and not per post, you do not get dumped off in the middle of the thread on the first unread post, but instead you get dumped off at the top of the thread and have to find the first unread post on your own.
If we sort with newest at top of "unread" and multiple posts were added to the same thread, then the top post is the last update, and you have to scroll-back up in the thread to find any other unread posts -- likely causing you to miss unread posts.
So, what combination of supported results returned would you like to see for "unread" ?
* Sort by oldest update with only threads returned and not post with the net result that clicking on the thread with update drops you at the top of the thread
* Sort by newest update first with posts as results, and the top post-link you click won't take you to the first unread post in a thread, but the last, forcing you to scroll up
These are the constraints we have.
I have seen requests from users of the software to the vendor to provide results returned as threads and the link to thread take the user to the first unread post, but there has been ZERO progress on that feature in ~3 years. People have abandoned our vendors software because of this. If you have ideas on an alternate to use, please suggest it to DT -- he has asked for similar things in the past, asking for recommendations on alternative forum software with features and a good security track record with years of support to demonstrate this.
The closest to functional is the present system for unread, if users only visit the top hit and re-check unread after finishing each post link to thread with updated posts.
If you believe this not to be the case, feel free to use your coding skills to generate a JSON query by using the examples provided with "Recent activity" and "Unread posts" URL to generate something you think is more functional.
if in the few days since I have visited the forums a thread has seen 6 replies to the discussion, i do not need (and desperately do not want) 6 lines of results in either "recent activity" or "unread content" because of this. one and only one result (linking to the OLDEST of the "new" content in that thread) is the proper thing to give users.
i visit the DEF CON forums less and less these days, mostly because they are not nearly as useful a tool for communication with the community anymore. :-(
I see more activity related to DEF CON on twitter than the forums. They have a lower cost to entry, and each user can manage their own sources of information, choosing to block people they do not want to read from, and follow those they do; nobody has to tolerate content that is disagreeable and censorship is distributed.
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