Sort by Recent ACTIVITIES Desperately Needed
The current "Sort By" value of Recent in the Ideas Forum only supports Recent POSTS. There needs to be a Recent ACTIVITIES sort (which should also be the default).
Without that capability, it is nearly impossible to discern when responses to topics have been made.
Comments
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Maybe you should've spoken up sooner? I'm noticing that there have been some very recent changes (as in, in the past hour): the default sort is now something called "recent", and there are also options called "Latest Comments" and "My Ideas" (as well as "Popularity"). The other major change is that topics now automatically (uncontrollably) open in a new tab.
(I'm a contrary beast. I always want to open topics in a new tab, yes, but I want it to remain my choice. Unpredictable and uncontrollable click/link behavior rubs me the wrong way.)
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Julia, with the recent release we have hopefully addressed a few of your challenges. In an effort to preserve your recent selections, we have changed the system that when you go to the details it opens a new tab. This makes it so your settings are preserved on the previous tab. I hope this helps.
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Thanks for getting on to this so quickly. I was tearing my hair out over it (and I don't have much hair left). Now that you have put in the sort by recent activity capability, I would prefer that it were made the default, but since changing it is sticky since the original tab remains there, I can live with this for a while.
1) When you go to the topic details, the default sort for those comments should also be by date of posting.
2) Also, in Safari, when selecting a topic, it is trying to open a "pop-up window" which most people typically have blocked. I've had to unblock it for this site but since most people tend to keep pop-ups blocked there will be confusion from the silent failures in Safari where nothing happens when you click on the Topic.
3) Lastly, I Agree with Julia. Please don't block the normal browser capabilities of choosing to open in either a new window or a new tab as directed by the user. The abilities to open a link in place, in a new tab, or in a new window each has its own advantages and disadvantages. I use all 3 of them for different things, but like some places in FS, I no longer have any control over that at all. I'm forced to work around what has been hard coded in (if it is even possible to work around it)
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By the way, sorting by Latest Comments, and Latest Activity are not the same. I hope that by Latest Comments, you really mean Latest Activity.
When I am sorting by Latest Activity, any new postings that do not have comments yet will fall in line with postings having comments around the same time.
But when I would sort by Latest Comments, Any new postings that do not have comments would obviously be sorted to AFTER all topics with comments (i.e., since the sorting is based only on the dates of Comments and not the Dates of new topic posts).
Latest Comments sorting would be far less useful than Latest Activity sorting.
I haven't check this yet, but I really hope that the actual behavior that is now coded is the Latest Activity type sorting (like is used in all the other FS Community groups as well as the old GetSatisfaction.com forum) and has only been inappropriately labelled.
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I just checked this. Unfortunately sort by Recent Comments is really what was implemented. If I or anyone else creates a new topic, You can't even find it in the topics list sorted by Recent comments. Presumably this is because they are being put at the END of the topics list with all other uncommented topics (which is hundreds of pages down!)
We need a Recent ACTIVITIES sort.
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The recent changes have not been in the wrong direction, but they're not quite in the right direction, either.
(1) Sorting. If I look at the list once sorted by "recent" and once by "latest comments", I think I'm getting a pretty good idea of all recent activity, but it still relies on my memory to avoid duplication of effort, and if someone's contributing right as I change views, I can easily miss something. The most aggravating part is that this is all totally unnecessary work and worry: a default "recent activity" sort would solve everything and be all that anyone ever needed or wanted.
(2) Open in new tab. I figured out why this is so infuriating: it doesn't just open it in a new tab, but also changes focus to that new tab. That's not how I operate, given a choice. On GetSatisfaction, my usual procedure was to go down the list and open each topic I wanted to read in another tab -- but with the focus staying on the tab where I was, so I didn't need to re-navigate the list. When I got down to where I could tell by the dates/times that I had already read everything, I'd switch to the first new tab, read the topic, respond as appropriate, then close that tab and move on to the next one. This forum currently makes this procedure well-nigh impossible to achieve, or not without a whole lot of extra navigation that makes my mouse hand hurt from just thinking about it.
Please give us proper control and just use regular, old-fashioned links that we can choose to open in place, in a new tab, or in a new window. These are user interface choices that have been built in to every operating system and browser since Windows 3.1. Stop breaking them. Please.
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Julia, some browsers have an option where when a new tab is opened on a link, the focus does NOT go to that tab. I never use this the way you describe but if your browser has that capability, it might be a good workaround for you until things get a bit more sane here :-)
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Firefox has a checkbox for "When you open a link in a new tab, switch to it immediately". I have that unchecked (off). Clicking on a topic in this Ideas forum ignores that wholesale: it opens in a new tab, and switches focus to that new tab. I have no control over this behavior.
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" it opens in a new tab, and switches focus to that new tab. I have no control over this behavior."
Agreed (as a Firefox user myself). I find it very peculiar - FS must be spending their time coding behaviour that's already implemented in browsers.
I've not worked this out but if I switch back to the full list on the front page, in order to generate a new tab (i.e. manually recreate the old - and preferrred by me - behaviour) then it rather looks like the new tab is actually empty, so I need to open up new tabs one at a time, waiting for each one to appear.
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This topic has been marked with a status of "Implemented" but it has NOT been implemented yet.
EDIT 10/8/2020: This now appears to have been implemented. Thanks FS!
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