[SUGGESTION] Make feeds with starred articles more visible

I do not know if it is technically possible, but I would like to propose a suggestion in order to improve (my) user experience :innocent:

I read most of the articles via the mobile app, and star typically those with videos, are too long or contain many links.

When I get home I review all the starred ones, by feed. As they are all read, what I do is switch to “starred” on the top-right menu, unhide read feeds and go one by one for those that I remember I starred something than click on the “starred articles” category on the top left for what is left.

While this is not a big issue, and I am quite accustomed to it, I would like to propose a couple of “fixes”.
Please be aware that I have no idea at all if those are even possible.

The best one, that would be life-changing, is that if I click in the “starred articles” category, the feed list would update, showing only feeds with starred articles in them (either read or unread). I believe this is not viable, as this behavior does not work for “fresh articles” for example.

The second best would be changing the color of the font of the feeds with starred articles. Yellow for example. This is like the grey for feeds that contains unread articles but are set to “no update”.

I can not think of another way to make easier to “consult” starred articles.

One small clarification why I read them by feed and therefore just clicking on the “starred articles” category is a little bit of a bump: a youtube channel I follow posts around 5 minutes videos, while another are around 30 minutes. Depending on how much time I have, I either watch all the short ones
or one of the long ones. If I select just the category, I have to scroll through all the other articles.

I know this might seem like a first world problem. Therefore, if fox deems unnecessary, I am totally fine with it.

Thank you very much for the attention and sorry for the wall of text.

a lot of these makes sense, i agree that having starred articles as a flat list quickly becomes annoying when there’s a lot of them.

what happens when you click on a different feed? imagine the feed tree jumping around like that, it would be really annoying.

what could work is a separate hotkey to show feeds with starred articles only (like showing unread feeds only).

i’m not sure how much of a resource drain would be getting those numbers for feed counters.

this could also become annoying. for example, i keep starred articles for months, sometimes, when it’s tt-rss feature requests i need to think over. this color marking would be meaningless in this situation.

what could be done is assigning a separate class to the feed (unstyled by default) to allow marking via user css for those who want it.

i’ll make a note to look at this stuff when i have some free time; meanwhile if anyone has other ideas to improve starred articles, post them itt.

this whole thing led to an interesting journey into forgotten depths of counter-related code.

as a result, the entire counter cache system (which was a pain in the ass to implement way back then) was scrapped and most of the counter-related code rewritten.

to get back to the point, feeds/categories which have starred images should now get an appropriate row class, so something like this should work in user.css:

body.ttrss_main .Has_Marked {
color : green ! important;
}

i thought about showing number of starred articles as an alternative counter (like special categories do when there’s no unread articles) but it seems to be inconsistent with the rest of the UI and makes feed tree look too busy for my taste.

Just to clarify is this all done in the mobile app? The webUI has the starred articles category that only shows starred articles so I am confused why it’s so hard to find the articles you have saved.

it’s not hard it’s just annoying because you either have a flat list of articles which might need a lot of scrolling down to pick and choose what you need (if it was starred a while ago) or you need to go on an adventure switching view mode to starred and finding the feed you’re interested in. it’s clumsy.

e: with incoming changeset you’d be able to do this:

body.ttrss_main[view-mode="marked"] .Has_Marked {
    color : green ! important;
}

so feeds are highlighted only if you have starred view mode enabled. this could be added to the default stylesheet, i think.

Ok thanks that makes sense. I usually don’t carry a ton of old saved articles so I haven’t had a problem. But I do agree having the feeds highlighted would be good. I don’t know much about stylesheets so I am going to ask. Will the category the feed is in also be highlighted if you don’t have the category expanded? Or will the highlighted feed be buried in the collapsed tree?

017v1JAR

not sure about multiple nested categories though

This is exactly what I was thinking. Thank you for considering it and implementing this so fast.

IMHO, it would be nice, but it is not necessary. The counter on the right of the starred articles category updates, so I have a vague idea of how many are left, even though I do not know how “spread” they are.

That is exactly what I meant, but I am extremely with the latest version.

Again, thanks a lot

Hi Fox,
Not sure if it’s related to this change. But since doing a git pull just now (deefa901a).
The unread counter for nested categories is kind of broken.
NestedUnread

I’ve done all the usual tricks, clear cache, incognito mode, the result is the same.

yep, this should fix it:

https://git.tt-rss.org/fox/tt-rss/commit/a6ced361890ab44e049369ac63a74b63f8820b7e

thanks for reporting.

Just did a new git pull and it’s indeed working again.
Thanks for the quick fix Fox.

with this changeset feed tree should switch to showing starred counters if view mode is set to starred: https://git.tt-rss.org/fox/tt-rss/commit/60288f02e8947282bf9226f63d0ce052f9c9ac61

this is something that i personally was missing after above changes.

This is elegant and extremely pleasing to watch.

What I believe is missing is a keyboard shortcut (for example f z) or a top menu that would update feed tree with only feeds containing starred articles, either read or unread. It would make managing those articles much more easier.

But as I wrote earlier, I am very happy with the current situation

Thanks again for improving what was already better than before.

Regards

this makes sense but first hiding of categories/feeds would need to be reworked, i’ll make a note to take a look at this.

i think hide read feeds might as well hide feeds with no starred articles when browsing by starred, a separate mode/hotkey seems like unnecessary function bloat.

the option should probably be renamed (or a comment added that notes this behavior)

e: this is now in trunk

I git updated and I am now using v20.02-282b445

Unfortunately “Un/hide read feeds” is broken for me.

I tried using the keyboard’s “f a”, hamburger menu “(un)hide unread feeds” and preferences “hide read feeds” but I am not able to hide read feeds, no matter what I select in the top right menu (unread or starred).

I used Chrome 80.0.3987.116 in regular and incognito mode, and tried with Microsoft Edge, without any difference I could notice. I could try to disable plugins, but I am not sure it has any impact.

Below is browser’s console:

AppBase.js?1582285246:161 keyeventToAction f a => feed_unhide_read
common.js?1544814978:20 xhrPost: {op: “rpc”, method: “setpref”, key: “HIDE_READ_FEEDS”, value: true}
common.js?1544814978:20 xhrPost: {op: “rpc”, method: “getAllCounters”, seq: 7}
AppBase.js?1582285246:161 keyeventToAction f a => feed_unhide_read
common.js?1544814978:20 xhrPost: {op: “rpc”, method: “setpref”, key: “HIDE_READ_FEEDS”, value: false}

The database’s error log is empty.

I am on shared hosting, using PHP 7.2.27 and MariaDB 10.2.31.

Please let me know if I can provide more information.

Regards

Yup, same here. Checking ‘Preferences’ the ‘Hide read feeds’ is still ticked. Tried un-ticking ‘Combined Mode’, no difference. Also, access using ‘chromium-browser -incognito’ same situation. f a keystrokes does nothing. It’s broke.

Edit to add: This is on self-hosted, hard metal, i.e., no docker instance of tt-rss. postgresql 9.5, php 7, …
.

It’s working just fine for me. git clone on Debian, postgresql 12.2, php 7.3.

this is done through CSS now so if you’re using a third-party theme it will need to be updated.

It’s late here and I gotta turn in for the night, BUT I wasn’t using third-party, my theme was set to ‘Default’ when this issue started. I’ve now set the theme to ‘light.css’ and Hide/un-Hide Feeds is working again at commit 282b445 . Thanks for the hint.

OT: At the moment, clicking on any link to a commit like say:

https://git.tt-rss.org/git/tt-rss/commit/282b445a43eaf34f79e946fd2e41bcf96a365fbe

is now redirecting to: https://git.tt-rss.org/install

.