Note the picture. I have detected that the “Show Hidden Stories” button appears if you click the specific feed in the feed list so that the feed name appears in the top line of the reading window (where All Site Stories is in the diagram).
Now, I don’t use a lot of training. I mostly use it to turn off certain authors in gang blogs (Hugh Fitzgerald, I am looking at you), but this issue prevents me from using it more. It’s a negative for the whole “training” thing.
There is the correct picture.
One more small addition. When running in that configuration for the left nav bar, the red hidden items don’t appear at all in the nav (because they are hidden, duh). At the same time you have to actually click on the feed with hidden items in the left nav bar in order to see the “Show Hidden Stories” button. In this configuration, there is nothing to click even if you think you know the feed with the hidden items.
Bottom line: that little red box with the count in the bottom bar is not only completely useless, it’s intensely frustrating as it alerts me to something to which I cannot navigate. In these early phases of using this training feature, I naturally want to go back and confirm that I am not missing something I don’t want to miss. Until I can satisfy myself that I have made the right training choices, I want to be able to peek at the hidden items.
Is that crazy obsessive? Possibly, but then you knew that from my writing three entries here about it.
This only happens in All Site Stories. It’s hard to find those little red devils, since I don’t keep track of them like I do regular unreads and focus stories. I’ll keep this in mind next time I’m rooting around in that code.