Reply To: New site is ok, new style is not
Are you asking for a feature that is specific to only logged in users?
Now that you mention it… it would have to. Because it has to compare what you read the last time you looked to what’s out there now (or it couldn’t show you the difference), and in order to do that, it would have to recognize you as being the same individual who was here X hours (or days) ago.
That at least offers me an explanation of why it’s not done this way on a lot of sites. (Incidentally, it’s always implemented as a type of search you can do, behind the scenes it’s a search for threads with activity since time X (presumably extracted from data saved about your account). More sophisticated versions will look for anything you haven’t read since you joined the forum, which, if you keep up and read everything, reduces to the former case. Hmmm, maybe there’s a widget out there that can do the latter? Search for unread replies since the date the logged-in user joined?)
I’ll have to look into filtering the latest activity feed. Removing the friendship and new member notices would make it much more useful for finding recent *posts*. As of right now my method is to scroll to the bottom of that, keep hitting “load more” until I see my avatar, an indication I’ve mad it back to the last time I was on, then scroll up, opening tabs whenever I see a topic for the first time. (If I remember seeing “climate change” I don’t open it a second time, because that reply will be on the tab I already opened, just down a bit.) It works as long as I remember to open in new tabs, and as long as opening new tabs doesn’t slay my computer like it did on T|A.
Your widget on the right is a decent workaround to the logged in user aspect of it; I can scroll on my own to the first reply I haven’t seen yet. However… it seems to only show five or six threads with no provision for adding more; if there has been activity in fifteen threads since I was last here, I’ll never know it based on that.
On the whole I think a filtered activity feed would probably work a bit better depending on how much activity there is. (Now I just have to figure out how to filter it.)
[Edit. Found it. The control is not visible on the home page, you have to go to “Activity”]
