How the Latest Threads Appear on the Forum

[Folke]

This forum is beautiful, functional and great. And threads that are new or have new posts in them are clearly indicated by a blue bubble with a number in it. This is perfect.

Nothing needs to be changed, but if there are some simple admin settings that can be altered I would like to point out that I have noticed the following oddities:

• some threads, particularly entirely new ones I think, are shown in the list in black text color, and this black color does not seem to change to gray until after I have opened the thread several times. Once never seems to be enough. What does the black color actually mean? Is there a setting that can make them turn gray once we have read them?

• it seems that threads jump up to a higher position for no apparent reason. I suspect this happens when we correct spelling mistakes etc in our previous posts. Being able to edit posts is very, very valuable, but is there a setting for controlling how and when an edit will move the thread higher? For example, maybe only move it higher if we enter a new reason for the edit (yes, there is an option to state a reason) or maybe only if you add an entirely new post to the thread?

None of this is a big deal. The blue bubbles with numbers are a reliable guide.

[James]

(I moved this post to the category of Meta - the place to talk about the forum itself)

Yes, I've noticed this as well. I typically bang out a reply, do a quick edit pass but then go back much later for another edit pass, as I know I'm not the best speller/grammar person and these posts stay around forever.

I did a bunch of those last night, so all of those posts appeared as "latest" again.

I looked through the settings but did not find a way to totally prevent that from occurring. I did change one setting that will allow people to go in for 10 minutes after they create the post and it will not show as updated. The previous setting was 5 minutes. I could make that even longer I suppose.

I will go to the forum folks website and see if there is anything else I can do.

Overall I agree with you, this is the best forum software I have ever used... but everything can be tweaked.

[Folke]

I have noticed that the thread position is no longer as jumpy as before when we do minor edits

But I have noticed another thing for some time, possibly related to the time settings you mentioned. As it is now, entire new posts made by others in that thread sometimes will not be flagged at all!

If your name was mentioned in the new post, this is indicated indirectly by a number near your name at the very top, but otherwise there is quite often no indication that new posts have been added to that thread. Can the time settings be set to apply to just edits? Or can the avatar of the most recent poster always be shown on the right, even if it is the original poster or an existing frequent poster? Or some other way to make us notice that someone has actually written a new post there?

[James]

I believe @sergio took a look at these settings. I noticed today that bubbles were appearing (more regularly) on topics I hadn't viewed yet. So I'm hoping this is getting better.

[Folke]

Yes, it is getting much better

It will never be perfect, but it is hard to understand why any minor spelling correction in an old thread can make it jump to the top. Maybe the Discourse forum developers are aware of this.

Conversely, the "new release" thread never seems to jump up even though that would be appropriate (when you post info about a new release in the original post). Curious.

But it works. That's the main thing.