topic Re: mark as read from within a 'support community' in SAS Programming

mark as read from within a 'support community'

Doc_Duke — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 19:01:50 GMT

I tend to read the discussions from within a support community, such as SAS Procedures. I am not "following" these discussions.

How can I mark them as read, so I only need to look at the ones I have not looked at before?

Doc Muhlbaier

Duke

Re: mark as read from within a 'support community'

LainieH — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 20:14:47 GMT

Hello there, thanks for asking this great question. Yes, in the past version of the community, it was possible to filter discussion by 'read' and 'unread' and I know that is valuable.

The new way of keeping track of information is handled by Tracking and Following. You can only mark items you are Tracking read or unread.

Tracking is designed for critical "need to know" information.

You'll see a blue "Track in Communications" button in the right navigation of the SAS Procedures community landing page. Click that and all activity from the forum will be posted to your https://communities.sas.com/communications page. You can access this page in the top navigation. The icon with the down-arrow will turn green whenever there is a new item. You can mark items read or unread there. You can "Track" whole communities or even just individual discussion threads.

"Following" a community will send updates to https://communities.sas.com/activity (accessible in top nav; first icon).

So in the case of SAS Procedures, if that is your main community, I would recommend clicking the "Track in Communications" on that page: https://communities.sas.com/community/support-communities/sas_procedures. You can even set your default view to be "Unread Only", if that is a benefit for you.

I hope this helps. Please let me know if I can answer additional questions.

I found this documentation from the software behind this community helpful in explaining this, so I wanted to quote it here:

Following vs Tracking: What's the Difference?

You have two ways to keep important things on your radar: you can follow activity or track it. Tracking is for crucial need-to-know. Following is for keeping up in a looser sense.

Tracking routes activity from individual documents, discussions, and places into your Communitications page, where you'll see it alongside @mentions, direct messages, discussions you contributed to, and any other activity that you're directly involved in. The Communications page alerts you of how many new items you have, and also lets you read-track your updates so you can be sure of reading everything that comes in. Click Track in Communications in the Action menu for any item you want to track. To stop tracking it, just click Stop Tracking. The updates you have will stay in your Communications, but no new updates will be shown there. (Note that if you track a space, you won't also be tracking its subspaces.)

Following filters your activity stream so you see the people, places, and items you're interested in, but without the urgency of tracking. Just click Follow in the Action menu for any item that interests you. As the people and groups you follow create new documents and make discussions or blog posts, and as documents you follow are updated, any updates about them will flow into your Activity page under Followed Activity. You can use following to keep up with people, places, and documents you're interested in, but not absolutely required to keep up with. To stop following an item, click Following so the button changes to Follow.

Re: mark as read from within a 'support community'

Doc_Duke — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 20:35:37 GMT

Lainie,

For my purposes, that seems to be a HUGE step backwards. How do I know what I want to track or follow unless I read it? I don't want to re-read stuff I've already decided that I don't want to track or follow.

I might be able to manage it if I could filter what I am following by community, but that doesn't seem to be a choice.

Doc Muhlbaier

Duke

Re: mark as read from within a 'support community'

LainieH — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 13:47:36 GMT

Hi Doc, Thanks for your feedback. I'll talk to and we'll see if there are any options in the tool that can be changed to support what you describe. I can see how that is valuable.

Re: mark as read from within a 'support community'

LainieH — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 13:49:03 GMT

, I wanted to cc you on this message because it has some information regarding your question about Page Cleanup.

Re: mark as read from within a 'support community'

SteveDenham — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 19:04:56 GMT

I really want to second Doc's observation. I almost ran screaming from the site as I had to guess, and guess, and guess again and again whether I had read something after being away for four days. Right now, I would surrender all of my points to have the ability to mark a thread as being read or unread.

Steve Denham

Re: mark as read from within a 'support community'

Doc_Duke — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 13:14:28 GMT

The forums have a limited feature to accomplish the read capability for a thread. It can show you which threads you have read, rather than mark an entire forum as read. It's a little bit of a kluge, but it works.

Got to a forum, select the "Contents" view tab. At this point, all of the thread titles will be in normal font. Select one. Now click the 'discussions' topic in the breadcrumb list. That takes you back to the content view. The contents display returns with all threads with unread content in bold and previously read threads are in normal font.

It's two extra clicks per forum, but much improved, for me, over the normal view.

Doc