Forum suggestion....posting date

Forum admins: Any chance you can add the date to the title list? It sure would help with scrolling! Tks

Hi @PPSJAY

I have two questions for you:

  1. Are you talking about adding the date to the category index pages? For example https://forums.flightsimulator.com/c/142

  2. Can you give us an example of what you’re looking for?

Check this link
it shows the date threads are posted


Okay, I thought that might be what you meant.

The short answer is yes, but perhaps not in the way you might expect.

Discourse shows the timestamp of the most recent activity on the category index page. This value reflects the time since the topic was created or updated (if there are no replies). Otherwise, the value reflects the most recent reply.

If you mouse over this number, you will see a tooltip that tells you the time the topic’s first post and last reply were posted. These timestamps should be in your local timezone.

If the most recent activity is old enough, the number will be replaced with a date. For example, the “About the General Discussion & Feedback Category Post” in this category shows ‘Aug 17’ (This date may be different depending on your timezone).

I’m not sure how one would go about seeing the tooltip on a small screen device such as a mobile phone.

1 Like

The tool tip is not visible on a small screen device eg. mobile, from where I am posting now. Would be great if the first post date is shown for a topic. Thanks

I’m not sure if that would be possible.

By design, Discourse tries to have a clean UI. This is especially useful on smaller screens as it reduces the amount of clutter and therefore the amount of scrolling required to browse available topics. By default, the posts are ordered based on their most recent activity (most recent -> older).

But I am curious, why the first post? Wouldn’t the most recent post be more useful (which is visible on mobile devices)?

Along with an initial post date placed adjacent to each post title I’d like to see:

  1. The Tracking/Normal option button moved/copied to the top with a Settings option to decide whether I want to Track something with its default set to Normal. In other words, I don’t want the current default to become Track just becase i was curious enough to open the thread.

Moving it to the top has the added advantage of being able to trash the entire thread with Ignore to mercifully silence the overly long, never solve anything complainer topics.

TIA

Thanks for your quick reply

So
 I am not sure if that is possible within Discourse. I don’t have access to the forum settings pages so I will have to ask the forum admin to take a look.

But I still don’t understand, what is the benefit of seeing the topic creation timestamp over the last update timestamp?

In theory, this button could be moved to the top of your page using CSS, but this would be an anti-pattern design choice as it is the Discourse standard for it to be at the bottom.

For this reason, I couldn’t recommend it as a site change. However, you could inject your own CSS stylesheet with the required style changes if you want it up the top.

If this is the main issue, it might be worth tweaking your preferences - see your preferences page (this link will 404 for other users). From here you can:

  • Change the ‘Automatically track topics I enter’ threshold. By default, it is set to four minutes, but you could set it to a higher value like 10 minutes. That way you would have to spend quite a bit of time in a topic before it changes to ‘tracking’.

    Alternatively, you could set this to ‘never’ so you have to manually change the topic status.

Alternatively, you can go to the Categories, and Tags pages (tabs on the left of your screen) where you can automatically set certain categories/tags to ‘Watched’, ‘Tracked’, ‘Watching First Post’ or ‘Muted’.


One other thought, have you looked at the Discourse Shortcuts?

If not you can find them by clicking on the hamburger menu (icon next to your profile picture on the navbar), followed by clicking on ‘Keyboard Shortcuts’.

The following shortcuts could be of interest to you:

Shortcut Action
Home Scroll to the first post
End Scroll to the last post
Shift + # Opens a modal that prompts you for a post number.
Once selected you will jump to that post.
m, m Mute topic
m, r Reset topic status (ie not muted, watched or tracking)
m, t Track topic
m, w Watch topic

A combination of changing your ‘Automatically track topics I enter’ setting + use of some of these shortcuts could be a really easy work around for you.