Thanks to everyone for the replies, they've been very helpful. My apologies for the delayed response. I'm going to group my responses in this message instead of sending several replies and filling everyone's inboxes.
Diana: The idea of double-posting the replies is interesting. I've been thinking about including and/or highlighting the previously read post directly above the first unread one. Thanks for the pointers to ChowHound and Lonely Planet - they have nice clean designs. Nick: Providing the user both options is a possibility, but I'm avoiding it as I think it will add a lot of clutter to the forum interface, as every single discussion would need both links in addition to every other bit of discussion information (title, total count, unread count, last poster...) Donny: Thanks for sharing your subscription practice. Sadly this is a purely Web-based forum, so the users of the boards won't have Gmail's capabilities. Mark: Your opinion closely matches my own (link to the first unread post), as the fact that the user is returning to a discussion indicates an interest in the topic and a higher likelihood of understanding/remembering the context of the original post. Another IXDA'er (I think) posted a link to QBN, but I can't find the e-mail now, so my apologies to the poster. QBN's forums take a different tact in some of their decisions which I rather like (http://www.qbn.com/ - a good topic to view is http://www.qbn.com/topics/535303/): The discussion view is single-threaded, but they've added the ability to add comments to each post, and they've limited the size of the comments. This method provides a couple of interesting attributes to a discussion: 1. It naturally separates one-off replies ("nice work", "Gallery was best part :) The rest of the site feels left behind :(", "love it, bookmarked") from the larger discussion. Users aren't forced to read through off-topic or content-light posts in order to participate in the core conversation. 2. More of the core discussion is available per-page, and there may be a higher likelihood of people staying on-topic for full posts. 3. People may feel more comfortable providing quick feedback ("nice work") in a comment that takes up little room than they would creating an entire post/reply. The UI doesn't provide much display room per comment, so if they want to write a lot, they have to use the forum Reply functionality And directly related to my initial topic, QBN has a "Dog-ear" concept, which allows viewers to mark their place in the conversation. When they return to a discussion they've dog-eared, the system takes them to the next item after the dog-ear. So instead of tracking last-read on the backend, the user takes an action to mark the spot to which they want to return. Thanks again to everyone! Alex ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
