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Thoughts on how a Discussion calculates # of new comments

rel1shrel1sh
edited January 2008 in Vanilla 1.0 Help
There are many times when I come back to my forum to track a discussion and don't have time to read the 400+ new comments in the thread. I've thought that it would be nice if there was a way (outside of the obvious: creating an extension) to have Vanilla record the LastViewed field in the UserDiscussionWatch table as the last comment on the page I'm currently reading rather than the newest comment in the thread. This way, I could read a few pages, and if I ran out of time, it would still show that there were 340 new comments.

Example:
I access my forum and see that the "Conversation Topic" has 400 new comments.
I click on the "New 400" link for the discussion, which jumps me to the last comment Vanilla recorded me as having read.
I read 3 pages worth of comments (at 20 comments per page) and then go to a user's account page to BAN them. :)
I then navigate back to the forum homepage.
At this point, it would be great if that Discussion now showed me that there were still 340 new unread comments, instead of 0.

Is this a desirable behavior to anyone else? Would it be a valuable inclusion into the Vanilla codebase, or is this extension territory?

Comments

  • WallPhoneWallPhone
    Wow... I like this idea very much. So much that I think this behavior is how the core should be working. In the mean time, it shouldn't be too hard to make as an extension. Could either just automatically return you to the same page you last read, or I suppose there could be an ajax link next to the comment that saves your place. OTOH, it might be easier to ban someone by browsing into a different tab or browser window :-)
  • rel1shrel1sh
    WallPhoneOTOH, it might be easier to ban someone by browsing into a different tab or browser window :-)
    Indeed!

    Thanks for the feedback Wall. I'm already working out what would need to be done for the extension, and it seems pretty straightforward. Ideally, I'd like to make this feature a toggle in the forum preferences, but I'm having trouble even thinking of a succinct, descriptive name for what this extension would be called...

    MarkCommentsReadByPage
    ShowOnlyUnreadCommentsAsNew
    KeepUnreadCommentsNewTilTheyreActuallyRead (!?!)

    Dunno.
  • WallPhoneWallPhone
    How about "Return to the most recent read page"?
  • rel1shrel1sh
    Ah ya, that's a pretty good description. I was thinking more along the lines of what the extension would be called, a la BetterBBCode or PrivateMessages, so the folder name isn't 100 characters long.

    Ahh... RememberLastPage

    I think I like that.
This discussion has been closed.