Forum Discussion

Dean_Gross's avatar
Dean_Gross
Silver Contributor
Jul 16, 2016

Displaying unread messages

How do we just view the unread messages? Every channel seems to show all of the messages, and i don't need to see the ones I have already read.
Allen's avatar
Allen
Icon for Community Manager rankCommunity Manager
Jan 07, 2019

Hi all,

 

We have just pushed out a beta version of an 'unread' filter to the homepage of the community. Go test it out and let me know what you think about it.

 

The reason it's in beta is the platform doesn't support 'unread' out of the box and so we have tried to build something that works for most members.

 

When you click 'Unread' after just loading the page you will see all 'unread' in the 'Newest' collection if you want to see the 'unread' of the 'Expert' or 'Unanswered' collection then you will need to first click the collection you want to see 'unread' for and then click 'unread'.

 

So to see unread of 'unanswered' posts you would need to:

 

  1. Go to the homepage
  2. Select Unanswered
  3. Select Unread

 

Let me know what you think and if this helps then we will roll it out to the filters at the product level and each of the conversation spaces. 

Dean_Gross's avatar
Dean_Gross
Silver Contributor
Jan 08, 2019

Some observations:

1. when select Unanswered, then click a post, then click next conversation, it takes me to the next item in the community that contains the original post. I was expecting it to take me to the next unread item.

2. this would be more helpful if were available in specific community groups so that it was more targeted.

3. a good start and long overdue.

 

Thanks for getting this in place

  • Allen's avatar
    Allen
    Icon for Community Manager rankCommunity Manager
    Jan 08, 2019

    Dean_Gross

     

    Thanks for the feedback, I want to be clear here. I have an open request in with lithium to look into a product enhancement which would remove this particular limitation of the platform but because I do not know how long that will take I got the devs to see what we could come up with that would help. So this is by no means a finished solution in my book.

     

    Taking a look at your points

     

    1. Agreed but nothing I can do about that one at the moment I am afraid (need above fix)
    2. Great to know, I wanted to try it at the homepage level first to see what kind of feedback we get before committing us further so if we get generally positive feedback we will roll it out to both the product / category level and then also the board / space level.
    3. Thanks we do try to make things better but there is always a trade off between:
      • If lithium will be making a change to their core product to support the improvement (i.e. the new editor coming soon)
      • When will lithium be making that change
      • How much pain is it causing members
      • How much dev time would it take to fix it ourselves
      • What will be the performance impact of custom code vs native development.

    so taking the editor for an example, the current editor is not great. We receive feedback on the editor from many areas of the community so we know it hurts. Lithium are planning to roll a new editor this year. It would take a considerable about of our dev time to roll our own editor and the custom code would likely adversely impact the user experience.

     

    For this reason we are waiting for the new out of the box editor.

     

    Anyway do keep the feedback coming as it helps me prioritize our workloads. Normally I would say submit an idea but the idea's board is broken at the moment so feel free to comment below and I will move it all to ideas once the Idea statuses bug has been fixed. 

     

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