This is an interesting idea. To be sure I understand this completely, you'd like to be able to mark a stream so that it's list of up to 5 recent topics (And their unread counts) are shown expanded regardless of whether you're currently narrowed to the stream.

Yeah, I can see this being quite useful if there are multiple conversations happening on a high-traffic stream, only one of which it's important for you to be following in real-time.

Yes exactly. Also, am I understanding it correctly that only the 5 most
recently updated topics are shown? If more than 5 topics in a stream all
have unread notifications, how are those displayed?
On Nov 12, 2015 12:04 AM, "Tim Abbott" notifications@github.com wrote:

This is an interesting idea. To be sure I understand this completely,
you'd like to be able to mark a stream so that it's list of up to 5 recent
topics (And their unread counts) are shown expanded regardless of whether
you're currently narrowed to the stream.

Yeah, I can see this being quite useful if there are multiple
conversations happening on a high-traffic stream, only one of which it's
important for you to be following in real-time.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#292 (comment).

I believe the logic is it shows those that have unread messages (but always at least 5); and then of course there's the "(more)" button to see basically the whole sidebar's height worth of topics on that stream.

Ok great, thanks for the clarification!

#285 is related to this

Thinking about this problem more, I think there are some interesting alternative designs that could solve a large part of this problem. E.g. currently when click on something to narrow, we land the user on the first unread message. We could instead choose to land the user on the last unread message, so that unread counts wouldn't change when you click on things unless the bottom of the screen is in sight (in which case everything gets marked read).

What do you think of that idea @asmartin?

@asmartin My current work in progress document on the logic of what Zulip selects upon narrowing #1601 might be useful as we think about this!

Also: We're hosting a livechat "office hour" at the open Zulip realm https://zulip.tabbott.net on Monday, August 15th, 10am-11am Pacific Time / 1pm-2pm Eastern Time / 10:30-11:30pm India time. Swing by if you want to talk about the pinning idea in realtime -- or about keyboard shortcuts for muting/unmuting, the experimental new desktop app, helping us figure out what new users need to know, etc. We'd be happy to see you.

I am going through all the issues tagged with area: left-sidebar, and this one seems like the closest match to my issue; please excuse if what I'm about to explain is a totally different thing, and/or a duplicate of another existing issue...

So, we have recently switched from Gitter to Zulip in Backdrop CMS (read about it here: https://backdropcms.org/news/backdrop-official-chat-switches-to-zulip), and although some minor getting-used-to is required initially, most things seem to work as expected, and they match some of the most sought-for needs of our community (with the main being threaded discussions). So a big thank you Zulip!!! 👍

To the issue at hand though: the one thing that annoys me personally, and makes managing my comms harder is this:

1. Multiple streams, with only one being expanded at each given point -> OK 👍
2. Indicators are shown next to each stream, for unread topics within them -> also 👍
3. Hovering over streams reveals a chevron, to indicate option to expand its topics -> 👍
4. Clicking on the chevron expands the stream 👍 ...but it also selects all topics, and marks them as read 👎 👎 👎

How I'd expect this to work is that the stream is expanded upon clicking the chevron, but no topic is selected yet -> the user now can either:

• click on the top-level stream label, which retains the current functionality of selecting everything, and marking it as read
• click on individual topics, which only marks the comments within the selected topic as read, leaving the unread indicator of the rest of the topics (and also the global unread indicator in the stream) intact.

This would allow people to go through unreads at their own pace; whereas now, one is forced to either go through all unread comments in the stream they have just expanded, or simply give up on ever going through their unreads.

Please let me know if I'm missing something, or doing something wrong.

...perhaps #4601 may solve my problem, but not 100% sure.

@klonos - Yes, this is exactly my experience/frustration. Did you figure out a workaround for this, or discover something you that you/me/we were missing?

I find it hard to believe this isn't a dealbreaker for more teams, so it stands to reason there is something I'm not understanding yet. Zulip noob, here.

@hazelsmasher no, no workaround unfortunately. I'm still being tormented by this.

....wow. So do you just use the "Recent Topics" view to access individual Topics directly? That's what I've been doing...

@klonos Good news friend - it looks like the chat.zulip.org community is actively working on this problem, and almost have it done. Their bleeding edge version just recently incorporated this --- let the people rejoice. Still a few tweaks to come on it I imagine, but perhaps our suffering is almost at an end.

@klonos thanks for the feedback, and sorry for the slow reply! One thing worth mentioning is that a lot of folks in big communities read Zulip heavily using the n keyboard shortcut (to jump to next unread thread) rather than using the sidebar at all; combined with pinning streams to reflect the priority of your reading order, this can work pretty well.

We're definitely going to do something about this UX, and I'd be surprised if that wasn't by end of summer at the very latest (We have like 15 GSoC students, so a lot of issues get cleared out during that window); we're currently thinking through the variant of this problem for "Private messages" as a simpler variant.

We're currently trying to get out the 4.0 release so that self-hosted installations are up to date.

@klonos thanks for the feedback, and sorry for the slow reply! One thing worth mentioning is that a lot of folks in big communities read Zulip heavily using the n keyboard shortcut (to jump to next unread thread) rather than using the sidebar at all; combined with pinning streams to reflect the priority of your reading order, this can work pretty well.

To make sure I got this right - pinning a stream does not affect the expanded/collapsed state, right?

My usecase - I'm a very new Zulip user, and our community is very fresh, too.
When I open Zulip, it sometimes shows a lot of unread messages for some streams.
I don't want to click on those streams, as that changes the read state in an unpredictable manner, and I cannot choose which topics to read. For example, one topic might have 20 unread messages, thus I'd like to postpone reading it to some later time, or maybe some topic is expected to be more heavyweight.

There is a hack, though - have somewhere a link (send it to the welcome bot, keep it in a draft...) to an existing message in a stream. Opening that link will expand all the topics without changing the read state.
If you have multiple streams like that, just have one private post with links to messages in all those streams.

Thanks for the description of your use case, @richlv !

One idea we have in mind is to have clicking on the stream open a "Recent conversations" style view for that stream, i.e., a list of topics, rather than an interleaved message view. Would that work for what you're trying to do?

My use case, or rather habitual pattern is to be reading threads with less comments first (to get them out of the way), and then select another thread and move on to the next (ideally till there are no more unread threads, but that hasn't happened in a while).

Would that work for what you're trying to do?

I think that that would work in my case too @alya.

Thank you, that seems like a nice approach indeed.
If it doesn't change the read state, it seems to offer all the benefits of a possibility to expand streams.