Planned changes or removal of Hot Posts / Unread Posts

[rworange]

This post about changing hot posts was buried in a thread about the feature breaking. I believe this is too important of a topic to get lost like that especially since Chow doesn't think it is not useful and outdated. From that post

http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/809920#6888895

"I do have to warn you that this is one of those features on the profile page that we are considering changing down the line as we try to clean up the usability on that page. Can you tell me exactly what you are looking for when you go to unread posts and why you are unable to find that in any other way? Or what aspect of unread posts you want to make sure we retain if we do re-organize that page? I ask because if we can figure out a way to take care of your needs with it, we will. We certainly don't want to get rid of useful functionality. But at the same time something as odd as a list of all of the posts users haven't read on a site as large as Chowhound seems more than a little suspicious to some of us who are working to streamline functionality."

Further down from Chow in reply to someone who it seems never uses this feature

":Hi Dave, That is what we were thinking as well. Why would people want to look at the unread page for the entire site? It seems like the type of usability from another era, when the site was much smaller and that would actually mean something"

For those unfamiliar with this feature it is ALL the posts on ALL the boards that you haven't read
http://www.chow.com/new_posts

It is the reason I fell in love with Chowhound. I discovered topics I might not usually catch on boards I rarely or never frequented. I learned a lot about food and great posters I might not normally catch.

[rworange]

I have more detail about why this feature is useful and how I would like to change Unread Posts in the link on the OP, but I'll sumerize those points here
http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/809920#6889870
http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/8099...

1. Remove the two hour time out

2. Feature this like Chow Digest

3. Call it something more meaningful than the confusing Unread posts

4. Add original post date

[jen kalb]

Im not really sure what feature is under consideration for removal. But "Unread Posts" is a critical site feature for me - seeing at a glance what is new on the Boards I follow - in addition to new posts on threads I have posted on, a different thing - makes the site more quickly useable to me. I thing you have to consider how different site users approach the site and access their information - I usually come in through either a link to Unread Posts - Outer Boroughs or through my profile and navigate around from there - but a less active or non registered user might come in through a different page - through the "Discussion" links for example . I sometimes have to enter that way when I have a bad interface. Isnt that the only place that all the new content on all the boards shows up?

PS - On the latter point, I think the Unread or New Posts view is just fine for a beginner entrant to the site - as long as they can get to the geographies I want quickly. I dont think the site does a very good job yet identifiying where people or helping them get to the info they are interested in (for example what comes up when I go straight to the restaurant page may be NY, generic or SF or Chicago, with no rhyme or reason), so simpler is better as an entry interface.

.

[rworange]

>>> PS - On the latter point, I think the Unread or New Posts view is just fine for a beginner entrant to the site - as long as they can get to the geographies I want quickly

If I didn't misread it, I think the thought was to do some sort of combined list based on selection. Hopefully Chow will correct me if I'm wrong.

Using my example, you could put together a hot posts based on boards you frequent: So I could select SF, General, South American, Site Talk, Home Cooking.

Which would be fine if you had the option to "select all boards"" which would allow the functionality of the current board.

I would like to see it not be confined by dates but continue to be all posts not read by me. If I'm off on a trip, I want to be able to scan everything that I might have missed since my last visit to Chowhound.

For someone new to the site, I'd set the default to all. There are so many people who are unaware of all the fabulous boards on the site. That drop down of boards isn't exactly intuitive.

Unfortunately, I don't think I made it clear on the OP that Chow was looking for poster input. From that post by Chow ...

"Merely the fact that I am wading into these shark waters should tell you how important making that profile page work well is to me! And considering how janky, er, un-user-friendly, the profile page currently is, I am hoping there is nowhere to go but up, as long as we make sure we take into account the functionality users need."