An almost universal feature of forums is the concept of read vs. unread topics. The groups and topics with posts that have not been read are highlighted in a different colour. Wikidot does not have this feature and requires the use of RSS, email or a page ordered by posting date. This is unwieldy and awkward. Wikidot should implement page status variables in ListPages, and a CSS class for the forum to allow pages and posts that have not been read, or which have unread children, to be highlighted.
phpBB handles this feature by keeping track of when each user was last active — the time they last fetched a page. The next time they log on, this time is frozen and used as a default cut-off — all changes older than this time are assumed to be read. It then keeps track of pages that have been fetched in the current session and marks those as read too.
A similar algorithm could be used by Wikidot. A hash table of 8k bytes (64k bits) per logged-in user would be sufficient. (Which gives less than 1% chance of mis-representing a page in each session, given 30 pages read per session.) It may be preferable to keep a separate last-active time for each site, but very few users would notice if only a single global time was used.
There may be caching implications, but note that it is only used for logged-in users. Anonymous users see everything as unread (or read).
Yes, if this could be done for pages as well, that'd be great! ;-)
I can imagine that it would be accessible using a variable in ListPages and Live templates, but am not sure how it would be implemented.
Something like %%read%% or %%unread%% that simply gives back true/false wouldn't be very useful. On the other hand, something as powerful as iftags (ifread / ifunread) would be more difficult for Wikidot to implement - but a whole lot more powerful!
~ Leiger - Wikidot Community Admin - Volunteer
Wikidot: Official Documentation | Wikidot Discord server
I was thinking of a construction like:
ifread would be very useful, but not necessary.
That would work as well, probably even better. But alas, Gabrys has said that it probably can't be done. :(
~ Leiger - Wikidot Community Admin - Volunteer
Wikidot: Official Documentation | Wikidot Discord server
I thing the only possible variant of this is a list of unread watched items.
Piotr Gabryjeluk
visit my blog
It's not possible to make a list of pages that have an updated_at since the user's last sign out? :(
Although this would completely side-line the built in forum (again), how about this…?
If that is not possible, then I suppose a list of unread watched items will be useful to some extent… preferably linked to ListPages so that I can filter by category etc.
~ Leiger - Wikidot Community Admin - Volunteer
Wikidot: Official Documentation | Wikidot Discord server
@Gabrys, I am aware it would take significant development effort, but I hope it would not be overwhelming.
A list of unread watched items would be useful, but how would you present it? Supporting a whole new syntax is likely to be a fair amount of work.
As a selector for ListPages.
Piotr Gabryjeluk
visit my blog
I'm considering moving my forum offsite and just diverting my forum regulars there so that I can have a fully functional forum of the kind that just about everybody on the internet is familiar with and expects. There are too many 'standard' things missing and honestly I don't think that will ever change.
I agree, an off-site forum definitely has a lot of the features that all Wikidot-based forums lack, such as the contents of this wish for example.
Keeping in mind though that the focus is on wikis in general, it's probably to be expected that dedicated forums would be more feature-packed.
The one thing I lack there, is the ability to integrate it with my site. I can't easily show the "latest posts" or "posts by this user" on my site if it is done with an external forum - and that is ultimately the reason why I moved my forum to Wikidot a while ago. The lack of that single thing is more important to me.
Of course, more useful forum-based features at Wikidot would be nice though - and would make Wikidot perfect for forums.
Cheers,
Shane
~ Leiger - Wikidot Community Admin - Volunteer
Wikidot: Official Documentation | Wikidot Discord server
Go to you http://www.wikidot.com/account/activity (Activity Tab of youfr account) and you will see all the new and unread posts - but only if you are watching the site.
Service is my success. My webtips:www.blender.org (Open source), Wikidot-Handbook.
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