I pressed dismiss all. It cleans it up, but I had several threads I was actually watching which also got then dismissed. But it was either Dismiss all or just stop using the forums. So hopefully loosing the threads I was watching is just one time thing.
To be clear, Iâm not blaming anyone for anything. What Iâm saying is that you arenât ever going to get rid of old information on the internet. This is a problem that extends way beyond programming forums - we deal with it daily in our business (film scanning) because thereâs 30 year old information out there thatâs no longer relevant. We have to deal with people every week who find this old information and think itâs gospel, even though there have been drastic changes to the way we do what we do. Itâs a real headache to spend your days explaining to people that what they think they know is wrong.
So a better way to deal with outdated information is to make it exceedingly clear that the information in that thread may very well be out of date, and how old it is. The forum can already do things like this, when it tells you at the top of a post that the poster hasnât posted in X years or months. It should be trivial to add something to the top of the thread, or (maybe not so trivial but pretty cool) to posts that reference deprecated functionality, that the information may be out of date.
There are advantages to allowing replies to old threads, especially ones that had a lot of participation: the people who were following it would be notified, and in the case of a forum like this, might be the best qualified to answer a question. When you have to start a new thread and you can only reference an old one, that capability is lost, unless someone manually tags all the people they want feedback from. âŠand it may very well be that a lurker who solved the problem but didnât post would never know they had an answer for someone.
I just think outright locking isnât a good solution here - flagging messages as potentially outdated would be a better, more seamless way to do it.
Also: Mark All As Read. Dismiss All does not work.
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What happens when you do Unread â> Dismiss All? I have been testing it since it was brought up here and it seems to work fine for me. Having said that, if itâs not working or something is going wrong weâd like to address it.
The âUnreadâ button only contains threads you are following or participating in. It does not contain threads you are not participating in. Dismiss All only marks stuff youâre following, as read. Right now it says I have 7 Unread topics.
âNewâ only contains new posts âin the last few daysâ according to the tooltip. Dismiss New only does the 21 it says are new.
But if I look at the forum listing (âLatestâ lists posts in reverse chronological order) there are hundreds, if not more, unread posts. This makes it very hard to see what has bubbled to the top. There is no way to mark these as read.
What people are asking for is âMark All As Read.â this does what it says - marks all of the messages as read in the current view of messages. So in âUnreadâ or âNew,â Dismiss All basically does this. but there is no equivalent for âLatestâ.
At least for me, I want to read what I want to read, mark all as read and go do some work. When I come back, the new stuff is bold and at the top, so I read that. It keeps it neat and speeds up usage. Plus itâs how almost every other forum software out there works.
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I was kidding.
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In theory all posts are marked as read but some still of different color. Other forum software puts everything in the same âalready readâ color but here we end with many posts with bright white indicating they are not read:
Edit: I think that is what Tim is referring to:
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As far as I remember this was a problem of some setting in the forum. For me dismissing does what it should. I think itâs this here:
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Then the best way to make them relevant is to update them, or remove them.
With auto-closing threads, you get duplicates, because the same question canât be asked or updated in the existing thread. With duplicate threads, a user searching for that topic has 1/ to come to the right place.
With keeping the threads open, a user would probably ask in the same thread and it gets updated with a new answer. Then other users with the same problem would just scroll to the bottom to see the latest relevant answer. Itâs just a matter of the user noticing the answer is no longer accurate (where the problem would be the same with auto-closing, duplicating threads).
So, sorry, but I donât understand the point for auto-closing threads.
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Ah, maybe there is a setting to change. Thank you for that.
In other forums you see this button to mark everything as read, see how the topics are dark blue:
then I click the button and they change to light blue and the document icon is no longer highlighted:
so it is very easy to use.
One example which comes to my mind: Take Xojo Web for instance. Granted, somehow solvable via an own category for web1 and web2, but thatâs not what we currently have. So if you are searching for something you might be happy to have found a solution, only to be close to suicide a few moments later by realising that it doesnât work at all with web2 
.
And with something more sophisticated like JavaScript hacks this can potentially even cause harm and/or unnecessary support questions. Plus one might be talking about web1, but the next one replying from a web2 perspective, w/o both not mentioning the used platform explicitly.
We saw that in the past, and it was annoying.
This is interesting - I changed my notifications preferences to consider topics new when âI havenât viewed them yet.â I went back to the top of the forum, and it told me I had 23 new posts. But when I click on New, and scroll down in that view, there are probably 150 until it suddenly says there are no more. I âDismissedâ them and âŠthe top page of the forum still looks the same to me, with a bunch of stuff thatâs not marked as read.
I guess I donât understand why the software doesnât just have a Mark All As Read button. It couldnât be clearer what that does, and it should just work. Iâll wait to see how this new setting plays out over the next few days though. But ultimately, Iâd like all messages on the entire forum to be marked as read (by me), so that I only see the new ones in bold.
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But how does closing the thread to new comments solve that problem? If anything, it kind of makes it worse: If someone was able to comment on it, at least that gives one of the original people on the thread a notification and a chance to let them know itâs not a valid solution any longer.
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Well, if your search leads you to an older, closed, thread, you may not notice the thread is closed (or just assume itâs closed because of auto-locking) and try the solution anyway, exactly as if this was in a single, updatable, thread.
Not better, IMO.
âAll models are wrong, but some are usefulâ ;-). There are many pros and cons and they were discussed in the past. Iâm lucky (and happy) that it is none of my business 
. Though I do remember, that last year I was actively involved in a discussion on one thread with some others, until someone pointed us to the fact (I think it was Rick) that we are currently discussing to find a solution to a 7 years old topic! and the OP was even no longer active on the forum, only because someone liked a necrotic post 
.
I think there will never be a right or wrong on this subject. I am sometimes more surprised, that some people donât seem to search too much before asking a question, I am myself jealous about those of us who are masters in structuring and linking their responses to brilliant content, knowing that is not my strength.
As things stand, its the only way to stop them appearing as âSuggested Topicsâ, AFAIK.
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I remember that (had happened several times, Iâd say), but I donât see any problem. You just ask again for the same subject, then someone answers with a newer solution and when someone searches for this problem, thereâs a single place to look (the end of this single thread).
I frankly think itâs better than having, say, 10 threads (even just 2) for the same subject and having to read each to find the most appropriate answer.
I understand this so well. I too canât usually make a question or an answer easy enough to be understandable.
Suggested topics when you search for them?
No, suggested topics listed at the bottom of any thread. Like this thread.
Ah, I get it.
But if a non-closed thread would still be helpful (as an outdated one may be updated by asking there again), why would it have to be hidden from this list?
If the date/time were displayed in bold instead of pale grey it would be OK.
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