0003779: Add read marks for new text, and add time to "Updated" field - MantisBT

ID	Project	Category	View Status	Date Submitted	Last Update
0003779	mantisbt	feature	public	2004-04-27 15:14	2010-08-15 17:01

Reporter	permutations	Assigned To
Priority	normal	Severity	feature	Reproducibility	N/A
Status	new	Resolution	open

Summary	0003779: Add read marks for new text, and add time to "Updated" field
Description	I set up our installation of Mantis so that notifications are sent out only for changes in text--either a new bug report or a new bugnote. (This was amazingly tricky to do, but that's another topic and I posted this elsewhere.) I wish that Mantis used read marks to track whether a bug report has text the user hasn't read yet (either the report is new or has a new bugnote). Nothing else needs to be tracked--just new text. I originally thought that when the Updated date and bugnote count were bold that it mean there was new text, but that doesn't seem to be the case. When I read the notes and refresh, it's still bold. So what does the bold face indicate? I can't figure it out. If it's supposed to indicate unread text, then this is a bug report that it's not working. If you implement read marks, they should be stored in the database, not as cookies. The cookie method is very unreliable. The PHP open source forum YaBB-SE (now renamed to something else, can't remember what) does this very nicely. Related to this issue, it would be very useful if the "Updated" field in the bug list included the TIME as well as the date. This could serve as a workaround for the lack of read marks. I'm going to try to add this as a hack. Without some ability to tell from looking at the forum when there are new posts to read, you are dependent on the email notifications to tell when there is something new. You should be able to get full information from within Mantis itself.
Tags	No tags attached.

permutations 2004-04-27 15:41 reporter ~0005443	For anyone interested: Found meaning in manual for boldface--a kind of pseudo read-mark functionality. Set "Change" filter to the desired number of hours, and items changed in that time are bold. I added the time to the updated field by changing all the global time strings in the config file to be the long version. I still think read marks for text additions and changes would be great.

permutations 2004-04-27 15:46 reporter ~0005444 Last edited: 2004-04-27 16:03	Oh wait--I have an idea for a way to implement this that would be almost as good as read marks, and much easier to implement. Instead of having "changed: hours" as the filter, allow users to display everything changed after a given date and time in boldface. Then you'd only have to remember when you last read the messages. edited on: 04-27-04 16:03

ericb 2006-03-27 15:47 reporter ~0012419	I had the same confusion about the bold text and am still searching for a way to indicate that there is new informaiton in a bug that I haven't read yet. To me this is one of thoese areas where a bug tracking system and a forum start to over lap. On phpBB there is a mod called keep unread. That mod makes is so that un read status of a topic presists until a user loads the topic. If a new reply is posted it is marked as unread again. Each post also has a small icon that looks like a sheet of paper. So, if you have read a topic previously, but, there are new replies the replies get a orange sheet of paper for this icon verses a white for the replies you have already read. http://forums.mantisbt.org/ Bug tracking systems could learn a lot by looking at the features of a form as compared to how the notes are handeled in a defect. It doesn't seem like this keep unread feature for mantis should cost much in terms of resources comsumed for page loads as it is commonly implemented in forum software that runs on similar hardware. I second the vote for an unread status for bugs and notes in mantis.

ericb 2006-03-27 15:50 reporter ~0012420	Issue 0006160 is a duplicate of this one.