Have the top-bar reading link remember your place

[stuntpilot99]

Title:
Have the top-bar reading link remember your place

Area:
Reading / Commenting

Summary:
Reading link restores your place in your new posts, by loading to the last post you interacted with.

Description:
Scenario is thus:
You read a couple of recent entries
You post a reply and get taken to someone's journal, perhaps read and comment on other posts there from others
You click the top bar read link to carry on working through updates - and you go right back to the start

Have a link which memorises where you were upto, so you get a page load that links you immediately to the last post you interacted with (ie the one you clicked to dive into someone's journal).

Reason being, chances are someone would like to catch up with all unread posts from the day/week or however since last reading, so would typically work through all posts in the unread page until they hit old already read posts.

If your list is big, stepping back to where you left off could easily be several pages, so this is a nice convenience.

Browser back button doesn't cut it as you're potentially stepping back through several comment forms - so it's often equally inefficient.

Issues

Since you last were on the reading page there could have been new posts added to the list, so you might not be at the same point on the page, or even on the same page. But given you can know what post they last clicked on, this shouldn't be an issue.

The last post you interacted with is deleted. Ok, that might need you to go to the next (depends what you know when you build the page the first time, and how easy it is to retain that), or just simply reset and start from scratch in that case. It's never going to be a particularly common case (though I'm sure there's a community somewhere that proves it quite common).

Poll #8896 Have the top-bar reading link remember your place

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 67

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
6 (9.0%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
3 (4.5%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
28 (41.8%)

(I have no opinion)
25 (37.3%)

(Other: please comment)
5 (7.5%)

Comments

[chagrined]

I wouldn't use this but would be fine with it existing, but would be against it if it became the only behavior of the "reading page" link. As an alternate behavior somehow (second link? option one can set somewhere?) then I have no opinion.

[stuntpilot99]

Could add a second link in the top bar perhaps, or have it change mode on how you're using it. (I'm not a big fan of overuse of options personally)

[montuos]

+1

[turlough]

+1

[cheyinka]

Yeah, I wouldn't have an objection to the reading page working that way for other people as long as it didn't work that way for me.

[azurelunatic]

Use case for entry deletion, though I devoutly hope it'll never get bad: spam. (With OpenID users able to post to communities, this will mean an uptick of entry spam, though we keep CONSTANT VIGILANCE against those suckers.)

[azurelunatic]

I want this to happen in some fashion, although I am not firmly committed to this particular implementation of the concept.

[green_knight]

This sounds like something to put into the navigation bar, for people who like it (I don't).

My inclination would be to make it a user-initiated thing - click the button, then surf on, click it again to return.

I have no idea whether 'go to xx.html' is possible on the reading list. What if the wanted article is no longer on /read but "read?skip=20" by the time you come back?

[matgb]

I have clicked 'no opinion' but was very close to clicking ' do not implement'.

In both the brosers I use regularly, you can right click the back button and get a drop down to go several pages. In addition, most browsers also support tabs whcih is a more usable solution already available.

Ergo I see little point in implementing what looks to be a lot of coding when there are already commonly used features to prevent the need for them.

FWIW, re the back button solution, I suggested awhileback a feature where skip X would be linked to post ID so you could always hit back to the page you were on, and there're anchor links available per post which could also be used to help assist in that.

@OP is there a reason why either tabbed browsing or right click/back X aren't solutions available to you?

[stuntpilot99]

Back button pulldown
1: It's a mouse action, which personally I try to avoid wherever possible, as it's a big slowdown from workflow.
2: It's got a max depth of what 10 or 20?

Tabs
When I'm using my netbook, it has very limited happiness with using tabs. When on the thinkpad, it's better, as I can and do use tabs, but generally prefer not as I've usually got far too many open anyway iyswim.

Wouldn't strike me as a lot of coding - seems relatively straightforward given what you have to know to build a reading page in the first place - push that place somewhere, and pop when you come back. Yes I;m sure there's a litle more to it than that, and I don't know the code.

At moment I overuse alt left for back x however many needed, but it's far from a slick solution, hence dropping it in as a suggestion.

[aibro]

I don't know. If I find something that I like in my reading list, I just open it in a new tab/window.

If anything, I'd prefer some bookmarks that I can place in between entries instead to keep track of what I've read.

[susanreads]

Me too! A got-up-to-here marker for each reading filter would be really useful, especially for the filters I don't get to on busy days.

[msilverstar]

+1 - I really miss this feature from other conferencing systems

[arethinn]

Something that appeared on hover when on the reading list, that you could click to say "mark my reading list place here"?

(It would have to get cleared somehow, though, without explicitly having to set another one: I wouldn't want to have to mark my place every single time to avoid being jumped back too far the next time I read.)

[shameless2shoes]

I would find this very annoying, to be honest, particularly if it remembered too far back. (Though, I would've found it useful before I started just right-clicking to open links in a new tab. I also found expanding my reading page to incorporate 30 entries instead of the default 10 rid me of most of the nuisance.)

I wonder what would happen with people like me, who often have the same window open several times, sometimes by accident, sometimes to compare two things on different parts of the page. But perhaps I'm a rarity.

[cheyinka]

You might be a rarity, but if you are I am too :D

[stuntpilot99]

Hmm, never considered that tbh - I guess that'd complicate a little. But I tend not to have the same page open multiple times.

Other:

[fyreharper]

I almost went with "Shouldn't be implemented", but what I mean by that is actually "Shouldn't be the default behavior of the Reading Page link". Personally, I use that link to get back to the top of the first page (when, for instance, I've had a bit of catching up to do and am in the middle of a skip= page) to see if anything new has come in.

Re: Other:

[melannen]

+1.

I wouldn't object to some way of implementing the functionality, but I want the read link to always take me to the newest posts on my reading list, which is what I use it for.

Re: Other:

[aedifica]

+1 (this is my "no opinion")

[ciaan]

I don't want my reading page to function like this by default. Or maybe it could if you very very very carefully defined "last entry" (newest entry interacted with vs. oldest entry interacted with vs. entry most recently interacted with) because I open everything in a new tab and so probably wouldn't notice it, BUT. I do not start at the top of the page and read backwards in time. I go back to where I was and read forwards chronologically. I hate seeing someone's more recent entry before their older entry. The way I'm reading this suggestion, if I did anything directly from my reading page, it would then take me back to the newest entry aka AWAY from where I wanted to be. I know lots of other people read forward chronologically as well.

[stuntpilot99]

That looks like a nice option in it's own right - though for me reading chronologically would make more sense if it had some way of picking up where I left off, and reading forward (ie displaying messages in reverse order to presently) until reaching end.

[ciaan]

Yeah, that would be a nice option, too.