- icefirei
- |
- Noble Heroic Member
Posted by: Recon Number 54
If there were a way to mark a thread as "viewed" or "new content since last visit" and the topic icon could show the status of that change. I would consider that to be an improvement. For example, dim or make transparent if there are no new posts or edits to the thread and it has been viewed, and bold/full color if there is new content or edits to any content.
An expansion to that would be to allow members to collapse the frame if all stickies are "marked as read", but that any bold/color icons in the frame would auto-expand it and the option to collapse it would require reading the new content.
Or, I wouldn't mind if stickies were classified into two groups; "must read" and "should read". Must read would be limited for rules and official posts, "should read" would go under the "top forum topics" and make it widely known that a personal bookmarking of a thread is like a vote to "make this a member nominated sticky".
I think that all could be accomplished using the icons on the left side of the thread titles. Do all the threads in the "pinned" box need the "pinned" icon next to them? It might be better to use a "new content" icon next to the ones that have said new content. The "rules" icon ("pinned and locked") should stay, but doesn't need any changes, since nobody's allowed to post in the rules threads except mods, right? Bright, bold text for unread threads and faded colors for read threads could help too.
The "must read"s and "should read"s might be derived from this as well. Pinned and locked "rules" threads, and popular threads stickied for good information or to reduce duplicate topics.
The only problem with a "mark as viewed" button would come from stickies that get a lot of replies. If the only way to collapse a box was if all of the sticky threads had been viewed, you'd have to "mark as viewed" and collapse the box every time somebody replied. Maybe if the rules threads had been viewed, and the sticky topics' OPs had beed read at least once, then the box could be collapsed, but with a "new content in sticky's" notification next to the "pinned topics" header. It might be counter-productive to stopping duplicate threads though...
I see that the reason for the box to be there at all times is to prevent "bad" threads from happening, but I'll keep thinking about plausible ways and criteria to collapse the box. At the very least, it would be nice if the posts below the box got the full width of the black area, as well as the reply workspace. The second part might not work as well, considering the only time the workspace would be below the sticky box would be if you're replying to an unusually long thread.
On a side note, is there a way to exclude locked threads and stickies from the "hot topics" box? I mentioned this in the bug thread, but I don't think it's a bug, just an unintended consequence.