Just found this out the hard way. If you double click a feed, in the left hand list, all the items in said feed get mark as read. Why is this a thing? Can you please disable it?
5 Likes
Why is this bad? I use this all the time, it’s a convenience, just like having keyboard shortcuts.
I’ve discussed this before, but if you can figure out another action to be associated with a feed double-click, I might add it as a preference.
By the way, double-click the unread count and it will just mark it as read without opening the original feed link.
How about as an alternate way to open up the settings for that feed?
In the past two months I’ve accidentally double-clicked a feed more than a handful of times, making this feature really annoying: It’s a really destructive action which can be triggered too easily (and it’s not always noticeable).
I also never double-clicked to mark all items as read—I prefer to use the button for that purpose.
My suggestion would be to add a preference to disable this feature (there’s already a button to mark all as read); otherwise, I think that there should at least be a “grace period” to undo the action.
2 Likes
Yeah, a simple “Are you sure you want to mark this feed as read?” pop-up would go a long way at making me and Fillpe here happy! 
2 Likes
Constantine, I don’t think a pop-up is very friendly, at least every time a user wants to actually double-click to mark all a read. For example, brasscrest said he/she uses this feature often, and having to confirm/dismiss a pop-up every time would be a bad experience in this use case.
Perhaps some sort of a first-time warning, with an option to disable this feature, would be a better option?
Now we’re talking quite a bit of dev time to support a feature removal that has been there since day 1. I’m fine with leaving this feature the way it is, as it never bites me and I haven’t heard of a better alternative that won’t take all day to build.
Also, I know this is purely psychological, but it’s just that much harder for me to agree to a feature build under a thread labelled “problem” when a great alternative like “idea” is there, waiting for you to pick it. And this is literally a “question” anyhow.
Samuel, but it affects some of us for some reason or another. I have lost a few days of items because of accidental double-clicks quite a few times before.
I’m not an UX guy by any means, but something doesn’t sound right when you can do such a destructive action with such an accessible shortcut and have no way back. One click to open, two clicks to mark all as read.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not in favor of removing the feature. I’m sure you, brasscrest and many others use this feature intentionally pretty often, and removing it wouldn’t make any sense.
I’m just asking for some way to deal with accidental double-clicks, or some other remedy for those who don’t want to use this feature but get bitten because it’s so easy to trigger it.
Is the suggestion to have a grace period like Gmail’s “undo send” (that is, delaying the request to the server to mark-all-as-read) not viable?
Or maybe with two clicks, and a extra click to confirm?
This part of Samuel’s comment wasn’t published when I started to type my previous comment:
Also, I know this is purely psychological, but it’s just that much harder for me to agree to a feature build under a thread labelled “problem” when a great alternative like “idea” is there, waiting for you to pick it. And this is literally a “question” anyhow.
This is semi-offtopic, but can you change the “thread-type” to “question”?
I just reused an existing, related thread, to avoid creating yet a new one.
I understand how annoying it is to be asked to “break” an existing feature after being told it’s a problem, but that wasn’t my intention.
I’m trying my best to be constructive since I really like NewsBlur.
If it makes any difference now I can open a new “Idea” thread about this issue with my suggestions.
You tell me.
I don’t actually have moderation tools on GS. I kind of like it that way because it shows that I’m dedicated to transparency, since whatever shows up here will also show up on the dashboard. If it ever gets abused, I’ll have to purchase moderation tools, but that hasn’t happened in the three years I’ve been using GS.
As for the idea, I’m still not sold, and it sounds like a non-trivial amount of dev work to support that ideal of a one-time confirmation (which I also don’t like).
I just saw via Twitter that there’s a new setting to disable the double-click behavior of marking all as read.
Thanks Samuel, it’s a very welcome setting!
Yep, and there’s another thread I should probably go notify. Glad this finally got in.