Hi,
Where have the quick words to go back to "unread" or "new".
We only have back to the top, which is hopeless because it takes you back to the top of the page you have just read.
I want to go to "unread" or "new" lists.
Why change??
Also the related topics list are locked up topic not the latest relevant topics.
Please get this page back to what it was last week.
Tom... 
Hi @TomGeorge. Thanks for your report. This was an unintended side effect of a change I made yesterday to switch to using a new improved system for determining the list of topics of interest to display at the bottom of a topic page:
From my experiments, the topics suggested by the new system are far more relevant than those suggested by the old system (which I found to frequently make completely worthless suggestions). So I would like to continue to use the new system, but would also like to make sure the change doesn't negatively impact the usability of the forum.
I'll do some investigation and circle back here once I have a better idea of what our options might be.
Hi,
Thanks for the reply, but all suggestions at the moment are locked and old, there must be other open and later relevant themes.
The easy selection of new or unread is probably more important to me, makes navigation easier.
Thanks.. Tom..
I suggest the use of custom links in the forum sidebar as a replacement. I think you will find this actually superior because the links will be accessible no matter which forum page you are on and regardless of whether you are scrolled to the bottom of the page:
Topic List in the "Section title" field of the dialog.Unread in the "Name" field.https://forum.arduino.cc/unread in the "Link" field.New in the "Name" field of the new row.https://forum.arduino.cc/new in the "Link" field of the new row.You will now have an "Unread" and a "New" link in the sidebar:
You can click those links to quickly navigate to the lists of unread and new topics at any time.
Alternatively, you might try using the "Topics" link that is in the sidebar by default. That takes you to the topics listing page. By default, it always takes you to the "Latest" list. However, you can configure it to instead automatically link to the "New" or "Unread" list when there are new or unread topics available:
It is possible to configure it to only show unlocked topics. However, I'm not convinced that would be beneficial.
You are seeing this from the perspective of someone looking for topics to reply to. However, the majority of people browsing the forum are looking for information. Even for much smaller number of us who are primarily in the role of helper rather than helpee, it is still in our best interest for people to get the help they are seeking from previous topics instead of opening a new one to ask the same question that has been asked and answered many times before. For those browsing the forum for information, the fact that a topic is closed is irrelevant.
Of course it is also important to make it easy for the helpers to find the topics where they can contribute, but I feel there are far better alternative mechanisms for that purpose than this list of "suggested" topics at the bottom of the thread.
That is not a suggestion. That is the topics listing for the Using Arduino category. There wasn't any change to the topics listing pages. The change was to the list of topics that are suggested for further reading at the bottom of the individual topic pages.
That's exactly what it is supposed to do.
My opinion is that the reader of a topic is likely to be interested in reading other topics relevant to the same subject once they finish reading the current topic.
Do you truly find that useful? If you are interested in further activity in a topic, why not watch it so that you will get a notification when there is further activity? Relying on learning about new activity in topics of interest through the "suggested topics" algorithm happening to show the topic seems very inefficient and inconvenient when such a better mechanism is available.
Thankyou but its not as convenient, why was it changed, or has it happened in the course of forum updates and no one knows how to get it back.
Sorry to sound sarcastic, but that feature worked, and well before you lost it.
Tom...
Give it some time. It is normal that any change feels inconvenient at first.
I often find that if I give myself the opportunity to adapt before forming a conclusion then what initially felt inconvenient is actually significantly more convenient after all.
I already explained in post 2:
I'm simply not convinced by the feedback presented here so far that it was of significant value.
Well this had me puzzled, since I noticed it yesterday.
Often beginners post in unexpected and often wrong categories, so it is good to see what is coming in.
My work round is to use the NEW link at the top of the page, but it took me some time to find it.
However, I now find that I am not getting any notifications of replies I have posted in under my avatar icon in the top right hand corner of the screen. This needs fixing so it works as before.
It is working fine for me. I just logged on and had a slew of notifications for new replies in topics in which I had previously replied.
If you check the bell icon on the topic scroller or the buttons at the bottom of of the topic on one of the topics where you did not receive a notification as expected, is it set to "Watching"?
I don't see any reason the change to the suggested topics setting would affect the forum notifications.
Yes and it is now working for me as well.
It started working early this morning. It wasn't before because there was and still is, no notifications of earlier threads, that I only knew about because I saw a different number of unread replies than I was expecting.
Now it has gone again. No notifications from threads I have posted in, discovered by the number of unread messages I had.
This problem comes and goes. It is here again at the moment. This time I have captured this in a couple of screen dumps.
Here you see I have no notifications.
But the number of unread posts is 3, and I know I only have two unread notifications.
So I click on the unread icon and see what this new unread message is like this:-
You can see my avatar in the the unread thread, so I should be receiving a notification of this reply. Correct?
Basically however sometimes I am and sometimes I am not. This can change during the day.
Mah ... these "suggestions" had very little relevance before, related to my visited posts and interests, and have absolutely no relevance now, cause they are now only old, locked and totally unrelated topics ... sure, before they was a bit more logic and coherent, but just marginally, now are simply become totally useless.
I just ignore them completely, now.
I looked at them once and have ignored them since as they seem to serve no useful purpose
I agree, there is always locked subjects below.
And now finding unread topics takes longer, it is a bit more inconvenient for me as a helper.
I was hoping this was some bug, but after the first day I suspected some intentional change.
What takes longer?
The "Unread" topics listing can be accessed via the link on the forum header and the sidebar. I don't see how there could be a significant difference in the time it takes to click a link at the very bottom of the topic thread vs clicking the link at one of the other locations on the page.
I agree when talking about the suggested topics section specifically. However, when the forum interface as a whole is considered, I think the tools are still readily available to allow the helpers to effectively find the topics they can contribute to. So I think we do still serve both. Some helpers will need to make small adjustments to their workflow, but I'm confident they will benefit from the adjustment in the end since the alternative tools are superior for their use case.
I see the potential for the suggested topics feature to increase the chances of those seeking help discovering the information they need. We know from experience that many of them are not very motivated to make a concerted effort to search for a solution. The solution is often already available here on the forum, but it does often require browsing through multiple seemingly relevant topics that end up being a dead end (e.g., does not contain a solution). My hope is that these visitors might be receptive to looking at information offered to them by the forum software. This is an application where artificial intelligence can actually be of value to this community by analyzing the massive jumble of content that is the Arduino forum and offering up the promising human generated content.
The topics now suggested after the change should be more likely to be useful as references for supporting the current topic. So in this specific way the change also benefits the helpers.
For me, I find topics to help with by first,
I rarely ever looked at the items at the bottom of the topic, as relevance was nearly always minimal. I hadn't even twigged to the 'new format', until this topic was raised.
Does the new method
The post count should be a good indication of a topic a newbie will actually benefit from; TBH, they aren't as likely to read a 60-post long topic even if it's finally solved. But a solution in less than 10 posts is likely to be a winner.
The ability ranking might be relevant to the answer quality, though this last one is more debatable; my thinking is, a solution by someone who's nailed several in short order along the way might be more useful, as he/she might have experience in the particulars of the problem presented.
** - but I just noticed, that filtering doesn't work. I tried to make uncategorized go away, but they still appear in the 'new' list. Shame.
Here is an explanation of how it works:
Your ideas about an algorithm are good ones. If the ability to improve the quality of the suggested topics by using the data from the "Discourse Solved" plugin was added, I would definitely enable that. Unfortunately at this time there is no such capability. Even if the new algorithm is not perfect, from my observations I still feel that it produces suggestions that are significantly more relevant for someone who is looking for information related to the subject of the topic they were browsing.
The categories on the forum sidebar are the top level categories. If you click on "Using Arduino" then you are taken to the Using Arduino category and see all the subcategories of that parent category. The Uncategorized category is a subcategory of Using Arduino :
so it is expected that you will see the Uncategorized category when you navigate to Using Arduino .
If you don't want to see Uncategorized, you can mute the category in your account's forum preferences:
You must select the one with the "Using Arduino" prefix instead of the one that only says "Uncategorized". The latter is a completely different system-generated (impossible to delete) category not used on Arduino Forum.This topic was automatically closed 180 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
