Topic on Talk:Structured Discussions

Some discussions take a long time to complete. Sometimes something goes unanswered for a long time and you'd like to bump the topic to get responses.

There should be some way to view topics with recent posts. And topics with recent posts must be visible by default.

The ideal initial/default view for me would be:

• Topics ordered by creation date, the most recent at the top
• Displaying the ~20 topics with the most recent posts

I don't know how you'd combine this with infinite scrolling. Maybe ordering by "recent post" date is the only solution.

Skalman: Ordering options for topics, is definitely on the to-do list (the 3rd item down at Flow/Release planning#Search.2Fbrowse.2Ffilter). Criteria suggested so far, are:

• "by creation date", (current/default)
• "most recently active", (as you suggest)
• "most active", (maybe useful?)
• "unsummarized/unresolved", (once the 'close&summarize' feature is implemented)
• "topics I've participated in", (maybe useful?)

Other suggestions welcome.

The elephant in the room seems to be that "most recently active" ordering of topics is still not enough to find what new posts have been added recently.

In a topic with above 1000 posts, where users can add new comments at any point, the only way to find the new posts would be to scroll through the whole thing looking for changes. I've seen proposals to highlight posts added since the last visit, or to collapse some of the oldest posts; but those approaches were tried at Liquid Threads, and they were terrible.

The way I would approach the problem of finding recent posts is by mimicking the current behavior of diffs and Watchlist's "X changes since last visit":

• Each topic header should allow to enable a filter to "show N most recent posts", with N being editable by the user.
• Within the topic, detect the group of the N posts with the most recent time stamp. For each post P in that group:
  • Show the base level, 0-nested post from which P hangs.
  • Show the post P' from which P is a direct answer.
  • Show P, highlighted to showcase that it belongs to the group of N recent posts.

This filter should be allowed at the board level too, to allow users to find the most recent posts in the whole page. If this was done, reordering topics would not be really needed - the most recently active topics would be the only ones left after applying this global filter.

Diego Moya: I think I agree with you. Your solution requires more thought about the design, but it's probably a good idea.

The key point of such design for me is that what is hidden/collapsed should not depend too heavily on my navigation status.

Any form of "X posts since your last visit" is nice as a default, but it will be lost if I refresh the page, open it in a new browser, or merely close the window after reading only half of the new posts, reserving the other half for a latter time.

There should always be a way to recover recent posts as defined from the thread status itself, just like the history diff tool allows now in the mediawiki software.