Not planned Please have Media menu choices honor the read marking setting and not hide the content

[beerForo]

From the navigation menu, the forums and apps will show you all the unread content if you uncheck the "Unread" filter. There's pagination and you can navigate as far back as you want on the results pages.

However for Media and Media Comments from the nav menu, the content is hidden instead of being unbolded and viewable. If you have your "Read marking data lifetime" setting at 30 days it hides it after 30 days instead of unbolding it.

This setting is for hiding: "Thread list date limit" (for Forums) and I don't have that set, I use infinity. The "Read marking data lifetime" should not make content disappear. I want my users to be able to navigate though all, this is not the expected result of this setting.

More info in this bug. Thanks

As designed - Media comments page not showing all comments

https://xenforo.com/community/whats-new/media-comments/ With the unread filter unticked, it is not showing all comments. It looks like it goes back about a month or less and that's it. Even on this site. There's only a handful from January and they stop and no pagination. I checked to see if it...

xenforo.com

 

[Chris D]

You seem to be making some assumptions that aren't correct.

The readMarkingDataLifetime is precisely for use with any system that handles some sort of read marking, or system that doesn't handle read marking (like profile posts and resources) but used to limit the results returned (for performance).

The readMarkingDataLifetime option is used in "New posts" too, but generally your forums will have considerably more activity so the fact that you can only ever see newer posts than the lifetime option is simply because there are so many, and we only ever display a maximum of 200 results.

You may be able to see that in the code here that handles fetching new posts:

if (!empty($filters['unread']))
{
   $threadFinder->unreadOnly($visitor->user_id);
}
else
{
   $threadFinder->where('last_post_date', '>', \XF::$time - (86400 * \XF::options()->readMarkingDataLifetime));
}

In simple English, if we have the unread filter set, we only get "unread" threads, otherwise we get threads where the last_post_date was within the readMarkingdataLifetime option.

Gallery comments are handled in exactly the same way:

if (!empty($filters['unread']))
{
   $finder->withUnreadCommentsOnly($visitor->user_id);
}
else if (sizeof($filters) != 1)
{
   $finder->where('last_comment_date', '>', \XF::$time - (86400 * \XF::options()->readMarkingDataLifetime));
}

To address some specifics in your message:

There's pagination and you can navigate as far back as you want on the results pages.

This isn't quite correct. In all cases, even with the unread filter (for threads or gallery comments), we still only show results occurring within the last {readMarkingDataLifetime} days.

Case in point, my "New posts" list only has 7 pages because I've marked a number of forums read manually and there are now less than 200 threads in total that I have not read within the last 30 days.

However for Media and Media Comments from the nav menu, the content is hidden instead of being unbolded and viewable. If you have your "Read marking data lifetime" setting at 30 days it hides it after 30 days instead of unbolding it.

So, as established above, this is not exclusive to the gallery and it is actually (as @Mike pointed out in your bug report) that this is actually how XF has worked since the beginning. It is indeed more prevalent and perhaps noticeable if you have a busy forum and a quiet gallery like we do, but the behaviour is consistent (and as designed).

This setting is for hiding: "Thread list date limit" (for Forums) and I don't have that set, I use infinity. The "Read marking data lifetime" should not make content disappear. I want my users to be able to navigate though all, this is not the expected result of this setting.

"Thread list date limit" is literally for the forum view and only for that. It has nothing to do with read/unread content.

The "Read marking data lifetime" does make older threads appear as though they've been read, indeed, while viewing a forum. But the entire point of the "Find new" system (New posts, New media, New media comments) etc. is to surface content that can be considered "New" or "Recent" or "Unread". Therefore filtering out older content based on the option is desirable, expected and ultimately the intended behaviour.

You may want to experiment with increasing the read marking value. It is rather conservative at 30 days. It can be increased though that may also make the queries to look up new content slower.

 

[beerForo]

@ChrisD Understood, here's the reasoning.

With the unread filter off (but I actually use a "?skip=true" in my nav link settings so my members see the "latest" by default):

and we only ever display a maximum of 200 results.

When I click Posts I can go back 7 pages of "latest" (140 results, same as you)
When I click Profile posts I can go back 10 pages, to 2013! (This is 200 results)
When I click Media and Media comments I can only see this month's "handful" of results due to the 30 day setting for read marking. Not 200 like profile posts.

So you can see (I think) why I'd see a discrepancy, and I have been trying to increase user engagement in the gallery. The profile posts, they barely use. I don't care about going back 200 profile posts to 2013.... why doesn't gallery follow "200" rule?

Is it hard to make that go back to 200 max in the future?

 

[beerForo]

I get that Profile posts don't use read marking, but maybe for the future the link in nav for Media can follow the "200" rule instead of the read marking rule for number of results returned. The forum is the most active so what happens there with read/200 makes sense but in less active areas perhaps 200 overrides read marking for results. Just an idea that I think is beneficial for engagement. Thanks!