More and more I find myself failing to reply to posts, failing to add useful replies and comments simply because there is no efficient way to track replies once they have appeared on my screen. This has been brought up before by me and others and I really have no idea how to handle it or how others handle this.
For now all I can do is accept the fact that Discourse is apparently meant mainly for casual chit chat social media type conversations requiring an attention span of about 5 minutes (or seconds of you like).
Discourse lacks basic functionality to manage discussions and conversations that take time to formalize.
So to all reading this: If I do not reply to your insightful and helpful posts, it is because you did not pose a question I could answer with either yes or no. If I fail to deliver additional information, like files or screenshots, it is because I read your post on another device or at an inconvenient moment.
**Sorry**
< /rant >
-Willem
@sam can you tell if any progress is made / work is done in this area?
Willem, is ‘Favoriting’ not useful here? e.g. you read a post on some device where you do not have access to the file you’d post, So you mark it as a favorite/starred and when you get to the right machine, you can get to that post easily, deal with it, then un-star the topic if you are done for now… something like that? I have not figured out what bookmarks are for.
Favoriting is only possible with a topic, not specific posts.
As @wim points out there is an option to bookmark replies, yet that IMO is not what bookmarks are for.
The functionality that explicitly lacks is a way to keep track of replies(or topics) in such a way that they are easily accessible via the “frontpage”. A way they can merge be merged in the list of new and unread topics.
To access either bookmarks or favorites you need to go onto your personal page and click either header to get a list of what you marked.
Willem,
I don’t necessarily disagree that an other system could be better than the bookmarks. I’ve been using both the favorites and the bookmarks for the purpose that you take up and I see that the list of un-processed favorites and bookmarks is only getting longer and longer…
Perhaps we need to work out some of the details before @sam is interested in looking into this…
We now have stars and numbers in blue squares behind the new and unread topics / posts. At one point not too long ago, I got the impression that all the unreads would list first and only when all those were read, the new ones would populate the list. Now you get unreads and new topics at the top of the list according to which category is being read. I feel it is a bit messy and I must say I personally liked the previous system better. Perhaps this could be a user setting.
But when we now would like an extra symbol (a reminder symbol) populating the suggested topics list we definitely need a setting to configure where they appear in the suggested topics: before / after the unreads; before / after the new ones; grouped per category…
I see ‘Favorites’ at the top; I can click that and see all the current favorites at once- this seems like a pretty good way to track topics at least, that I need to follow up on. As far as I can see Bookmarks are indeed only available from my page.
