Messages are never marked as read when following near: link.

[whoodes]

If one is to follow a link in the form of:

https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/stream/49-development-help/topic/%28no.20topic%29/near/829218

This will drop you at a point within a topic that is possibly well beyond your last read message, as such any messages viewed here are not marked as read.

This, of course, is the desired behavior to avoid marking messages as read all willy-nilly. However, this can have the counter-intuitive effect of not marking messages read when you are dropped at a point that places your oldest unread message in view (eg the link is to the very first message of a topic).

Say I'm dropped in at the * from following a near link (R = read and UR = unread)

...
R
R
R
UR
UR 
UR *
UR
...

In this case as well, I probably want to be able to mark messages as read.

A quote from Tim Abbott in this topic.

The problem is that thenear: link could go to a message that's far ahead of where you've read, and in that case we don't want to mass-mark things as read above where you've been. We probably need to change the logic to, for near,stream,topic narrows, set can_mark_messages_read if the oldest unread message in the topic is ever onscreen.

We would need to figure the right details for how to go about this, but in any case it might make for a more natural experience.

[hashirsarwar]

@zulipbot claim

[chrisbobbe]

This behavior came up in conversation yesterday; @gnprice mentions that the behavior of never marking messages as read when you follow a near: link is fairly recent, so here's a bit of archeology (thanks, Greg!).

That recent change was a0c11b6, on PR #12849. This was a follow-up to PR #12747, for issue #12556, which was for not marking messages as read in a search narrow. And that was done for issue #10886.

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[timabbott]

So, after reflecting on this issue some more, here's how I think it should work. Fundamentally, the reason we disable marking messages as read in near: narrows is because you might click a link from the issue tracker to a thread you haven't read, and we don't want to have that lose your state if it's 100 messages past where you're caught up to. The right trigger for enabling marking messages as read is your having the opportunity to see all the messages. So here's a proposed algorithm:

• If at some point the cursor is above the top unread message in a near: version of a can_mark_messages_read narrow, we flip a flag to set can_mark_message_read for the view (which means scrolling down will start marking messages as read)
• If you're in a state of such a narrow where all unread messages in the view are onscreen, we mark them as read (basically, the existing bottom_whitespace handler would, before checking can_mark_messages_read, check if all unreads are in view, and if so, enable marking messages as read in the narrow).

The other solution I can imagine is more explicit; having a "Mark topic as read" button at the bottom, if we think this approach would feel too magical.

[timabbott]

@alya should we close this? I think the new banners communicate clearly what's going on in such a view, and I'm not sure whether or not there's something further to do here. If there is, we should probably open a new focused issue, since I think the current writeup doesn't feel actionable given the changes we've made in this space in the last year.

[alya]

Yes, that's right. I think the banner resolves this general issue, and any further improvements can be filed as separate issues.