Finding new and unread posts

[Meatyfool]

Some fools saying it isnt working.

Click on quick links above and choose your poison.

When the topic list appears, lick on the circle to the left of the topic name not the topic name itself.

The read appears with the top post having its title in black.

That is the newest unread/new post.

Read from there.

Meatyfool..

[Gengulphus]

Thanks, but I'm afraid it currently looks useless to me!

Why? Because as far as I can see, it presents unread posts for every forum on the site that has them. That's already a biggish list, and it's going to become a lot bigger if the site turns out to be successful. I need to be able to configure the set of forums I am interested in - the equivalent of my "favourite boards" on TMF - and ask for unread posts on those forums only.

The facility may be there, but if so, I haven't found it yet. The subscribed forums facility allows me to say that I am interested in particular forums - but apparently wants to bombard me with a notification (or still worse, an email!) every time a new post appears - which is worse than useless as far as I am concerned! - and does not offer me a succinct summary of what's appeared on them, to be produced when I ask for it.

Gengulphus

[Meatyfool]

Don't subscribe bookmark instead you won't get the emails

Don't fret the boards are highly flexible according to stooz

I would not be surprised if the new and unread posts could be configured to be watched boards only

One sysadmin and a myriad of fool practices to be engineered - it will take time.

Meatyfool..

[Midsmartin]

What we have now is an off the shelf basic model of forum. Other things can be changed or added, but customising takes time. But I have to say that the old tmf firms were some of the best to navigate.. Though not perfect!

[Itsallaguess]

Thanks, but I'm afraid it currently looks useless to me!

Why? Because as far as I can see, it presents unread posts for every forum on the site that has them. That's already a biggish list, and it's going to become a lot bigger if the site turns out to be successful. I need to be able to configure the set of forums I am interested in - the equivalent of my "favourite boards" on TMF - and ask for unread posts on those forums only.

The facility may be there, but if so, I haven't found it yet. The subscribed forums facility allows me to say that I am interested in particular forums - but apparently wants to bombard me with a notification (or still worse, an email!) every time a new post appears - which is worse than useless as far as I am concerned! - and does not offer me a succinct summary of what's appeared on them, to be produced when I ask for it.

Gengulphus

I think it's recognised that we've got a bit of a learning curve compared to how simple it was to keep up with unread posts and threads over on the old TMF site, but I've just posted elsewhere on a process that seems much simpler to me, and doesn't have to make use of any of the 'Quicklinks' processes, which seem to confuse things even more in my opinion.

I've posted on this thread over in the 'Feature Requests/Bug Reports' thread, in answer to a similar issue raised by mc2fool, so I'd be interested in peoples feedback on that thread or here, with a view to perhaps making it into a 'Sticky' post to help others who are clearly having similar issues -

http://www.lemonfool.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=9&p=967#p967

The method I've spelt out in the above linked post seems to me to be the best one I've found yet, and stays within a particular board-area/thread process, which seems to be a big improvement on the use of the 'New Posts' or 'Un-Read Posts' processes used via the 'Quick Links' areas, which as you've rightly pointed out, seems to mix everything up and confuse us as to just which areas of the boards you're going to end up in if you navigate using those processes.

Any and all feedback welcome, of course.

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

[Itsallaguess]

In fact, I just discovered you can edit your display preferences to always give the latest reply to a post at the top of the page, which saves a load of scrolling to get to the last reply.

I think there's only a need to scroll around to find the last reply when you click on thread-titles themselves to get 'into' any particular thread. If you use the red icons to the left of those threads, where they are red to indicate new, unread posts, then you'll go straight to the latest posts that way without having to alter any default settings at all.

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

[Gengulphus]

Don't subscribe bookmark instead you won't get the emails

Thanks, but actually the best solution (for me - YMMV) that I've found so far puts together hints from you and others plus some investigations of my own, and it turns out to involve both subscribing and bookmarking. Here it is in case it's useful to others:

* Go to the forums which you want to read and subscribe to each of them using the link at the bottom of the page - the equivalent of setting them up as "favourite boards".

* Within each of those forums, go into each topic you want to read and bookmark it, using the "spanner" menu before or after the posts. This is a sort of equivalent to setting them not to be "ignored threads".

* Go into the User Control Panel (from the menu for your user name at the top right), select the "Board preferences" tab and then "Edit notification options" from the left hand menu. Within it, tick notification, email or both (according to taste) for "Someone creates a topic in a forum to which you are subscribed": this makes certain you know that new topics have been created in those forums and can bookmark them - basically, with topics being the equivalent of threads, it's a bit unfortunate that they're created as "ignored threads", but this tells you that that has happened so that you can bookmark them to "unignore" them. This is a bit clunky, but IMHO not unbearably so, at least so far...

* Untick the two "Someone replies ..." options (unless you actually want to be bombarded with notifications / emails caused by those events), and tick or untick the "Someone quotes" option and the one about moderators according to taste.

* When you want to catch up on unread posts in the topics you're interested in, don't try to do it from the main "Board index" page. Instead go to the User Control Panel again, choosing the "Overview" tab and the "Manage bookmarks" menu item. That gives you a list of your bookmarked topics, each with a circle to its left. The ones with red circles are the ones with unread posts, and clicking on the red circle takes you to its unread posts (and the unread posts are distinguished from the read ones by the small marker at the left end of the author line being red rather than white).

Gengulphus

[stooz]

Are these then the posts available under the bell icon at the very top?
Are we talking about the same thing?

[Gengulphus]

Are these then the posts available under the bell icon at the very top?
Are we talking about the same thing?

Assuming you're replying to me rather than to some earlier poster, probably not - because I have no idea what you mean by the "bell icon at the very top"! Which suggests that I'm looking at something different to you...

I'm talking about the list of topics that appears in the User Control Panel if I click on "Manage bookmarks" - while it's clearly aimed at allowing me to get rid of bookmarks, it does give me the opportunity to read the unread posts in those topics by using the circles at their left-hand ends, and that's useful to me because it pins things down to posts that are both unread and restricted to my selection of topics. Whereas the other methods I've seen only do one of those two properly, requiring me to do the other by eye...

Gengulphus

[stooz]

SOmethings maybe clearer with a demonstration - maybe a gotomeeting style screen share one day?
Also feel free to search for existing phpbb extensions that seem to suit, Im happy to install them for experimentation. Just look for v3.1 compatibility.