Box to select topics

Stream: Zulip meta

[Filippo A. E. Nuccio]

Would it be possible to add boxes next to topics so that one can select some of them and mark them read, without marking everything as read? My typical use case is having some 500 unread messages in a channel, of which I would like to keep those from 2 or 3 topics unread (for further investigation) and mark all the others read.

[Johan Commelin]

Here is my workflow:

• hit n to go to the next unread thread
• do I want to read this now? yes, ok read it
• do I want to read it later? Shift-U
• do I want to mark as read? Shift-G
• go back to step 1, or hit Shift-I to go to inbox

[Filippo A. E. Nuccio]

Well, I see, but what if you have 200 unread threads and you want to read 3 of them? You still need Shift-G 197 times...

[Johan Commelin]

Workaround:

• star :star: the three messages that you want to read
• click "Mark all messages as read"
• go to the 3 threads with a star, and hit Shift-U on the starred messages
• remove the stars

[Filippo A. E. Nuccio]

That's nice!

[Junyan Xu]

I would like to keep those from 2 or 3 topics unread (for further investigation)

I would send myself links to the topics as direct messages for this purpose.

[Filippo A. E. Nuccio]

I guess there is no progress on this boxing option, right? With the explosion of Zulip messages I find it less and less convenient to be unable to select say 50 conversations vrry quickly, mark them as read and then focus on what I care most. I appreciate @Johan Commelin 's suggestion, but I'm doing the same star-mark read-unstar trick on the same conversation over and over again. And the feature I'm speaking about was available in hotmail in 1999...

[Filippo A. E. Nuccio]

I should add that the Inbox view is already quite handy: when clicking on the number of unread messages it marks the whole topic as read, ans since in the inbox titles are quite large one can easily mark dozens of topics as read quite quickly. But if in that very view one could also have boxes it would be really useful: one could "select all" and then "deselect 2 out of 500" (3 clicks) rather than clicking on 498 conversations.

[Alya Abbott]

I filed Allow multiple conversations to be selected and marked as read in inbox (zulip/zulip#38197) to keep track of that idea.

[Filippo A. E. Nuccio]

Thanks @Alya Abbott !