I cannot find a way to mark all topics as read - either in a forum or a sub-forum. Is it possible to do this?
When viewing the “New” topics, you should find a “Dismiss New” button at the top and bottom of the topic list on the right hand side.
I just tried the “Dismiss New” (never tried that one before). It doesn’t do anything close to a proper marking of all topics read. This is my biggest frustration with the new forums.
Okay, so in preferences I just found under Notifications an option to “Consider topics new when … created since I was here last”. I’ll give that a try. Probably as close as I’m going to get to something that is just easy and makes sense. Even if that works as advertised, it still isn’t the same.
Nope. That’s not the answer. Oh, well. Good things come and good things go …
‘Dismiss New’ does not mark all topics read.
Since posts from the old forum have been transferred to here, every one is flagged as ‘unread’ (i.e. displayed in black text instead of grey). The old forum allowed users to mark all posts in a forum or sub-forum as ‘read’. This made it very easy to visually see new posts next time they logged in, as they would be displayed in a different colour.
Is this not possible on the new forum?
The way I understand it is that Discourse has a different philosophy to phpBB in that it’s not like an email inbox that you need to read everything, with that pressure to have read everything always gnawing at you.
The way I use it is to not worry about whether a thread is read or not, but do the following:
- Scan the “new” tab for topics of interest, or read everything depending on how much time I have. My preferences (under “Notifications”) are set to automatically “track” topics that I spend more than 4 minutes reading, or if I reply, or if I press the keys “m” and “t” in rapid succession to “track” the topic. Any topics remaining in “new” can be acknowledged by clicking “dismiss new”
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Any update to topics I track will then appear in the “unread” tab, which I check next.
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Lastly, if I want to look at what’s going on in conversations that I’ve skipped over previously, I can browse the category topic list and review everything up to the “last visit” line which shows me where I got to last time I visited. Again, I don’t feel compelled to read everything above this line.
Again, I understand this is quite different to the workflow that we’ve been all used to in phpBB, but as I become more used to it, I find it quite freeing to be able to keep up with new and interesting topics without having to read every update to every topic or continuously “mark all as read”.
Leaving topics as genuinely unread means that if I come back to it in the future (e.g. via search) then I actually know whether I’ve read it or not.
There’s obviously been quite a bit of thought that’s gone into this, so I’d really encourage you to give it a try and not worry too much about finding a way to “mark all as read”.
I certainly appreciate your input, Ben. I’ll figure something out that works for me eventually. It was just so easy before to view one page and see all forums and sub-forums and if there was any new posts. Old habits are hard to break. I think I’ll have a shot and a smoke … 
I have to agree with Scab that not having a ‘mark all topics read’ option really degrades the Steinberg forums in my opinion. And to justify it with the remark ‘There’s obviously been quite a bit of thought that’s gone into this’ is just an unnecessary passive aggressive way of saying that the forum users who don’t totally fall in step with the ‘new and obviously great forum’ brought about by the great thoughts of corporate Steinberg are non-thinking entities. I have obviously put no thought on par with the superior thoughts of Steinberg into this reply.
Having used the forum for another year since this topic was last discussed I still don’t miss the “mark all topics read” feature.
Ben, I will keep trialing your suggested sequence as above. Are there any other ways folks have navigated this change?
I still largely follow the sequence above, although I tend to step into a category or tag (e.g. #cubase , #dorico , #steinberg-licensing ) before looking at “Unread” then “New”
Thanks. What you describe is generally what I been resigned to doing. I am only on a few forums, and I do still appreciate that the others still have the ‘mark all as read’ option.
Just found this thread. Yeah, count me as one who is not getting used to it. The “last visit” line is unreliable because I leave a tab logged into the forum. So “last visit” sometimes works great, but if it’s been a few days, it sometimes shows as an hour ago, sometimes a day ago, etc. I personally interact with forums like this by reading a few topics, leaving others alone for now, then marking everything as “read” since I’m done for the moment. Later, I may want to read anything new (since my last run-through) in a topic that I previously had skipped.
If the “last visit” line was reliable even if I don’t log out, I could scroll back to that in the “latest” tab/feed, and just ignore everything before it.
As far as I can tell, there is no way to do that here. And while discourse does have a “dismiss”, I see no way to bulk select all the topics from the “latest” feed (where I spend my time, because I want to see at least the headers for everything that has been responded to recently), so I can’t “dismiss” them. It works in “new”, but not in “latest”. But “new” only has topics that were started recently. Long-running topics, or old topics that are recently revived, etc, are not there.
I am by no means an expert on discourse, this is the only discourse I currently spend much time in. It has some great features, but having to read a bunch of topics I don’t want to read just so there is a clump of unbolded topics to reliably mark the point where I last read (again, because the “last visit” line doesn’t predictably do what you want if you don’t log out) is headache-y. Especially because to “read” a topic, it seems that you have to manually click on it, wait some time, scroll to the end (not too quickly!) or hit the key, wait a few more seconds, then go back to the topic list. If you do any of that too quickly, it won’t be grayed.
If we could bulk-select-all in the “latest” feed and then “dismiss” (as can be done in “new”), that would be a useful workaround.