Is It Possible To Disable The Automatic Mark As Read Function Globally?

[Sockratease]

We are doing a clean install of smf 2.0.14 on a new host, starting from scratch.

Myself and our other admin have different ways of keeping up with new stuff.

I prefer the "recent posts" page so I can see every post in one page  (lousy web connection makes visiting each thread tedious), but he likes to see a list of "recent topics" to see what discussions are active.

We got the "Recent Forum Topics Boardindex" mod so he can see his recent topics, but that breaks the recent posts page so it only shows the most recent post in a thread  (if 2 or more posts were made, recent posts would only show the 1 most recent and the rest disappear).

He said a compromise would be if he could disable the automatic "mark as read" function globally.  Then all recent threads would show for him and all recent posts would show for me.  The fact that the topics get "marked as read" after he looks at them without being able to choose if that happens would make it harder to find a recent discussion without visiting each sub-category of everything to look for stuff.

He thinks, that way, the "show unread posts since last visit" would look the same for everyone and would just be a long list of all the recent topics/posts in chronological order. He also thought an upper limit 50-100 entries (per page?) may help keep it manageable.

Did that make sense??

I'm still on my 1st cup of coffee and may not be expressing myself well.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!


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EDIT:

Just noticed that mod only states compatibility up to smf 2.0.12 - so maybe that is relevant??

[Arantor]

what global "mark as read" function? The one on the board index show mark everything as read but only for the user clicking it, not everyone...

As for your use case, from the recent unread topics page, there is an "all unread topics" option that lets you see every topic you haven't yet seen (barring cases where you marked boards or the entire forum as read, from which it would count new posts after that time)

[Sockratease]

what global "mark as read" function? The one on the board index show mark everything as read but only for the user clicking it, not everyone...

As for your use case, from the recent unread topics page, there is an "all unread topics" option that lets you see every topic you haven't yet seen (barring cases where you marked boards or the entire forum as read, from which it would count new posts after that time)

Thanks for the reply!

The "all unread topics" thing is a start, but while we can mark boards or the entire forum as read. we are hoping to mark boards or the entire forum as unread.

I even tried "hacking" it by marking everything as read, then copying the command from the address bar and changing the word "markasread" in the "action=" bit to "markasunread" - obviously that didn't work.

I guess this would need a custom plug-in, or a modification to the one we are using.

I'll look into budget for this if you think somebody would be willing to create it as "work for hire" or something...

[Arantor]

I'm still confused as to why there would be a mark as unread function for an entire board, though.

Doing it is a little tricky because of the ways SMF stores this information at multiple levels.

If he wants to mark a thread as unread so he can find it again, that option exists on a per thread basis, but doinf it globally has consequences for his own usability as well as anything else.

I have to admit I'm still struggling to understand his use case beyond a few individual threads. Maybe the bookmarks mod for threads he cares about?

[Sockratease]

I'm still confused as to why there would be a mark as unread function for an entire board, though.

Doing it is a little tricky because of the ways SMF stores this information at multiple levels.

If he wants to mark a thread as unread so he can find it again, that option exists on a per thread basis, but doinf it globally has consequences for his own usability as well as anything else.

I have to admit I'm still struggling to understand his use case beyond a few individual threads. Maybe the bookmarks mod for threads he cares about?

That's understandable.

He doesn't understand why I need the recent posts page working properly.

I invited him to join this discussion but he has Life distracting him for a day or few and asked me to inquire.

Hopefully he can join in and clarify things more.

All I can say is thank you for your input.  Hopefully we can find a way to make things work smoothly for all of us.

The really odd thing is that we have two test forums running on totally different servers.

On one, the recent topics mod does nothing to the recent posts page, on the other the recent posts mod breaks the recent posts page!

The only difference is we are running 2.0.14 on the one it breaks, and 2.0.13 on the one that works normally...

Now it's doubly confusing.

I can get links to the sites if you'd like to see it, but they are members only since they're just test installs and the content is just our staff from the retiring site trying to figure out how to set up the new one...

Screenshots are possible too, but I am not sure how they'd help.

I think I'll upgrade the 2.0.13 site to 2.0.14 and see what happens...

[Arantor]

Do the sites have the same mods and is everything set up the same way?

[Sockratease]

Do the sites have the same mods and is everything set up the same way?

We've been installing and removing the mods the other site has 1 by 1 trying to pin that down.

We started this site with only the recent topics mod and nothing else.

There must be a simple reason for the problem, but can't find it.

We duplicated the settings for the mods identically  (barring human error I guess).

It's a mystery we'd love to resolve.

I don't have cpanel access on the 2.0.13 site so am waiting for a full back up of that (by that other guy) before updating it to 2.0.14.

[FractalFrank]

Hello!
I'm that other guy Sockratease mentioned. 
Reallife has calmed down a bit, so I'll try to explain my what/why.

what global "mark as read" function? The one on the board index show mark everything as read but only for the user clicking it, not everyone...

It seems like in our old installation the "mark as read" function is broken.
Once you've visited the mainpage, even without clicking any thread, all threads are marked read and won't show up the next time you visit. This has totally killed the activity.
We have many other issues caused by far too many plugins and mods, so a fresh install with the current version is probably the best solution.


What I have in mind is basically a list of all active threads in chonological order of last activity. Without any "mark as read" function.
I remember a long gone forum from back in 2002 where we had a "recent activity" button that showed a long list of the last 100 threads. There was no "mark as read", threads dropped out of view after some days or weeks when there was no more activity.
This way it was easy to find/re-read older threads by just scrolling down a bit.
It gave a great overview of what was happening and that button was the most used function of the board.
Like this, but a long list you could scroll down:


I'm 90% that old forum was YaBB SE - so I have hopes that maybe this is still hidden somewhere in SMF.

That recent topic-mod is going in the right direction but misses a few key-features - it shows a list of just 10 recent threads on top of the board index. So it's missing that big overview.

Just disabling any "mark as read" function globally, while implementing an upper limit of max 100 threads in a list would solve the thing. At least in my non-programmer brain..

I'm very thankful for any input on this!

Cheers!

[Arantor]

Something in your install is broken.

I've come back after months-long hiatuses in the past and always been able to get a list of all unread items. I might have to use the "all unread" list though, because the "unread since last session" functionality turned out to be less intuitive and less useful than planned.

The only other behaviour I can think of that is even vaguely related is that if you go into a board, the board itself stops having the new icon on the board listing, but the unread page still works.

[FractalFrank]

thanks for getting back so fast!
yep, there is many things going wrong.
It's basically a 10 year old installation with about 100.000 posts and a far too long list of modifications.
This is why we want to start new (and keep the old forum as read-only archive)

No, that "new" icon is not the problem. It's just about getting that list view, without any marking as read.
Do you think that is possible at all with SMF?
We'd be willing to invest a bit of money to hire someone who customizes it. (not too much, it's a hobby for all of us involved)

[Arantor]

It's completely possible because the behaviour you're talking about doesn't exist in SMF: there are only three times a topic gets marked as read in base SMF - if you read it (and then only to the last post on the page that you've gone to), if you mark a board as read or you mark everything as read.

[Kindred]

I think that you are getting confused...


"Show Unread posts since last visit" does exactly that...

shows the thread with new posts made SINCE THE LAST VISIT.

The fact that threads are not showing on THAT list does NOT mean that they have been marked as read (as Arantor already indicated)

You can still see *ALL* unread here:
index.php?action=unread;all

[FractalFrank]

I think that you are getting confused...

Indeed.

Sorry, english is not my native language..
If I understand how it works correctly, I guess it breaks down to this:
I don't want posts marked as read - even when they are read.

Disabling the following:

..a topic gets marked as read in base SMF - if you read it (and then only to the last post on the page that you've gone to)

My goal is a list like index.php?action=recent 
But instead of showing the text of the last posts I want to display a list of the thread-titles, like in my screenshot 5 posts above this.
This list must not change, even if a post/thread is read.
It should display all threads sorted by the time of last activity and include ALL active threads - read or unread.

Exactly what this mod does Recent Forum Topics on Boardindex.
Just not on the Board index, but its own page. And with 100 entries on a single page instead of just 10.

[Arantor]

Wait, you want to never ever mark topics as read unless you explicitly mark each and every topic as "yes I have read this topic"?

[FractalFrank]

Exactly.

I find that for a smaller/medium forum with an average of 50 posts/day "mark as read" is a rather unnecessary function.
Maybe even counterproductive, because if you read a post, but don't want to respond right away (little time, on mobile, whatever reason), it is lost, you probably forget it because it's out of sight.
If you don't remember the subforum/category where it was posted, chance is you don't find it again.
And you don't always remember to click on "mark as unread" to prevent this manually.

This actually happened to me with this thread today.
I wanted to edit my answer to clarify, but couldn't find it anymore because I have no idea where Sockratease had posted it and am not yet familiar with the structure. So even though it is an active thread I could only find it because I had posted in it via my profile/show own posts.

Disabling the automatic "mark read" once you read a post gets rid of this inconvenience. For my personal workflow, the whole "mark as read" thing is unnecessary.
Older, inactive topics will simply drop out of sight after a few days/weeks, when it is pushed down by more recent active topics.

Others may see this different, but I prefer to have a good overview rather than an automatic "unsolicited" cleaning system.

[@rjen]

I think you may actually be looking for this mod:

http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=1284

I am using this for reviewing recent topics, regardless of being read or not. Works a charm finding topics that were recently updated regardless of read/unread status....
And you can configure how many topics are listed.

Example (pardon my Dutch): https://www.fjr-club.nl/index.php?action=recenttopics

[FractalFrank]

Thank you @rjen!!
This is pretty much what I was looking for. 
Glad to see I'm not the only one with that "problem".

Even though I'm not a fan of AJAX, this is an acceptable workaround.

Settings can be found in 'Current Theme' options in your admin panel.

I can't find any settings there, even when I reset to the SMF default theme.


To the others:
Though this mod does what I want, I would prefer to not use AJAX and still think that only disabling "mark as read" for read posts would solve everything elegantly.
Any input on this is still welcome!

[Gwenwyfar]

If you can't find another mod that does this without AJAX, it may not be too difficult to get the custom actions mod and add one yourself for recent topics. You can copy the unread topics template and make it load the recent topics instead or just use SSI. (There is a guide to it on the wiki)

I personally have this on my sidebar, but you could make a page just for that:

Code Select Expand

ssi_recentTopics($num_recent = 7);

[Kindred]

or this...
index.php?action=recent

I think that you are seriously over complicating this and trying to "fix" something that is not actually broken...

[Gwenwyfar]

or this...
index.php?action=recent

I think that you are seriously over complicating this and trying to "fix" something that is not actually broken...

Oh, had completely forgotten that exists. Still not quite the same as a topic list though, but could be useful too