Neil McGovern <ne...@debian.org> wrote: > On Wed, Apr 15, 2020 at 12:47:06PM +0200, Ansgar wrote: > > I'm not concerned about marking messages read after some time and > > keeping the view time in ephermal storage for that. But that's not > > what Discourse does: as described elsewhere it stores all read times > > persistently on the server; that would not be neccessary for marking > > posts as read even on a web application. > > No, but it is required for things like knowing which posts in a topic > is popular, so should be used for auto-summary.
The more I think about this, the more I think "required" is overstating it. The system could just trust users to click "like" or "thanks" or "+1" or whatever on a post, rather than spying on them. > It also is used to reduce abuse, as a normal new user would spend > time reading topics before posting for the first time. Such heuristics have a bad history of blocking (and sometimes grossly insulting) people who use access-assistance software and special apps because they find unmodified major web browsers hard to use. I haven't tested any on discourse yet because it's a lot of work to sift the javascripts. Nonetheless, in case you don't already know, I really appreciate your work in giving us an instance to test and explore these concepts and consider what next. Regards, -- MJR http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ Member of http://www.software.coop/ (but this email is my personal view only)