Tip: Making the most of your Activity stream

[coldel]

Tips on making the most of the Activity function on the new forum

 

The Activity area is a key area to help you navigate the forum - it has preset and fully customisable (which you can save) searches which enable you to set up the forum posts look and feel to how you prefer it. Personally I find setting this up correctly to be fundamental for me to use the forum in the way I need it to. I will run through this from a desktop browser based point of view, as many people will be using this approach either as standard or have the capability to.

 

I have a shortcut set up on my browser that takes me instantly to this look and feel:

 

 

So I can see when I first open the forum all unread topics, condensed down, showing in order newest to oldest, who has last responded, to whoever initiated the post in what sub-forum and when I click on one of them it will take me to the first unread post. This is not how I suggest everyone set up their experience, but its one I find most useful, I am sure after reading the guide you can go and create whats best for you using the same approach, so how do you create this customised search stream...

 

The easiest way to get to a customised search stream of the forum is to use the Unread Content button which sits under your Activity section on the left hand side menu bar. If you press this button you will be presented with a default unread activity search with a search functionality bar at the top:

 

 

Here you can start to adjust your search parameters, above you can see it is showing all content type which in this case I am not interested in, I only want to see TOPICS which are highlighted.

 

Then under Read Status I can adjust a couple of settings:

 

 

In here I can see by default it just takes me to the start of the thread, so I can set it so that when I open a topic it takes me to the last unread post to save scrolling through the post to find the latest one.

 

The process carries on, I wont show all the different drop down menus I am sure you can click through and choose what you need its mostly self explanatory. OK so now I have set up a custom Unread Topics search which is set up so that I can jump to latest posts when I click them. But actually I need to see lots of threads on the page I don't need the preview part so I can select CONDENSED as per below:

 

 

This will remove the preview and give me all the latest threads in summary form. OK so now I want to save these changes, you will see this option appear each time you make an adjustment:

 

 

You can in the box that appears type in a name for it, I will for this one call it "Unread Content For Example" and click create stream. This will now appear under the drop down box on the left under My Activity Streams.

 

 

This is useful, but I like shortcuts, so if you look at the top of the page there is a little tick next to the title of the custom stream you have created. If you click this it will put a shortcut to it in the top right corner of your window and it will always sit there regardless to allow you no matter what your activity to jump quickly back to this preferred custom search:

 

 

I hope this helps in terms of working with the ACTIVITY section of the forum as a starter for ten. Clearly clicking ALL ACTIVITY and CONTENT I STARTED will give you different default start points to work from and customise but I think you should get the gist of it for now. So please do go ahead and have a play, it should help you create a much better navigation experience on the forum.

[Randy_Baton]

Would your shortcut work for other people? if so post it. 

[Jay84]

It may be worth noting too, that to get to the end of a thread when looking at the 'Unread Content' stream, click on the time of last post on the right of the screen rather than the thread title. Its a question I've seen mentioned a few times.  

Good 1st tip though @coldel, and although I only ever use the unread content view, it did prompt me to have a look at the all activity one and have a play with that. 

Edited August 18, 2017 by Jay84

[coldel]

The settings I use are:

 

Show Me: Content Items Only

Content Types: Topics

Read Status: Content I Haven't Read & Unread Item Links Take Me To First Unread Comment

Ownership: Everything

Following: Everything 

Time Period: Any Time

Sorting: Newest Content First

Results As: Condensed

[Wendy]

That was really helpful coldel.

Thank you

[coldel]

I'm going to bump this a couple of times in case anyone missed it 

[coldel]

Bump - this has proved really useful for people so will bump it periodically to help people make the most of the forum. It allows you to custom set the feed to most recent posts. Clearly you can customise as you prefer but this should help with anyone new who might have missed it.