I didn’t find any option to mark all messages as read. Is it even possible to mark unread messages as read?
The things I’ve found that are related to “Mark all as read” is this forum thread on discourse:
And some settings in user preferences which do not cope with what I was looking for.
Any advices or hints on how it could be achieved without having to enter threads into the “Muted” area?
I asked charlie the same question months ago, she asked someone from discourse.
He told her to mark threads as starred and then unstar them 
silly discourse 
I mark threads as read by ‘favoriting’ them with the star. That way i can clearly see if i have read a thread or not. Then all i have to do is pay attention to new posts.
I tried starring and unstarring them.
That doesn’t seem to do the trick. I don’t want to keep thread starred in which I’m not interested in.
It would be nice to have some sort of option / button beside “new” and “unread” where clicking would simply mark all “new” and all “unread” as read.
There is some other stuff coming that will help, but first, I’m curious how you are getting to tracking state on so many topics you don’t care about. Just as a reminder, out of box, unless you change the defaults it works this way:
You will ONLY track topics if:
(you can change some of this on your user preferences)
I am curious, how are you ending up with so many tracked topics that you are not interested in? Generally if I reply to a topic, or I read it for more than 4 minutes, I am very likely to be interested in the topic.
Not necessarily forever, it depends on the length of the conversation and whether it veers off into weird areas or stays on topic, but as a rule this is true.
@Codinghorror Thanks for your reply. Maybe I didn’t figure it out correctly and am now in a situation where I keep track of way too many topics (at least more than I would like).
The point is, if I reply to a topic, as you correctly pointed out, it keeps me informing of new messages, regardless if I want it or not. Just taking a look at them, as I learned, would also track them.
I am aware that I can setup the “track on enter” and “when it’s new”. Unfortunately I did this way too late, so that I have now topics tracked that I don’t want. I already changed my preferences to have it configured it this way now:
Having posted in some topics and having read some of them (with my old prefs), leads me now i.e. to this situation:
I was looking for a way to “clean up” this situation and have only the “blue and gray bubbles” on desired topics, if it’s possible.
ps: off topic: I would like to use an opportunity to express my admiration for your work. I’m a big fan of your inspiring blog for many years now. Glad that you’re working on this new kind of forum software.
Aha, yes, it will be bad – unfortunately, these “automatically track topics I enter” settings are retroactive, it is a design problem we have had for a while:
@sam do you have any ideas how to handle that? Otherwise the minute you change the “automatically track topics I enter” setting, you are screwed, even if we had a “mark all read” button. You’d have to mark thousands or tens of thousands of topics.
If you have just a handful of topics with state you need to change, we have an in-development UI for selecting multiple topics and acting on them, that will allow you to change them from “tracking” to “regular”.
And thanks for the kudos!
Thanks for the info. It helped me to understand the situation much better.
The contents of the topic you posted, does absolutely reflect the situation I’m having.
Honestly, I just noticed topics tracked were increasing during the time and I lost somehow control of how many they are. They might be just more than only a handful.
Being aware of this behavior now, having read the information you provided and reading that there’s already an imminent solution, appeases me.
Thanks for the offer with the in-development UI.
ATM I can live with it (more or less), so I will patiently wait for an update and be more attentive about the preferences that I set!
And you’re welcome! You deserve every kudos!
In related news, you will now see
Dismiss New button at the bottom of the New tab
Dismiss Unread at the bottom of the Unread tab
Give them a shot.
This is great news 
Thanks for implementing the features and for the heads up!
I’ve given them a shot and I’ve done the following observations:
Some additional thoughts:
Wouldn’t it be better to have the “Dismiss…” buttons on both ends of the screen?
Maybe a small symbol / text based link underneath “unread” and “new” (unobtrusive and in a smaller size)?
Button should appear at the bottom. Hard refresh your browser maybe?
Anyway, it’s rather unusual to have 344 new, and we do actually want you to scan the list before mashing the button to make them disappear – so having it at the bottom is intentional.
I found the ‘dismiss unread’ button and hit it! Its a godsend I had many unread posts from before i started and now they are gone i can get a more accurate idea of what’s new when i visit the forums.
I did clear all the cache, did a hard refresh, re-logged in, but still missing the “dismiss new” button at the bottom of the list. (Chrome & Firefox)
All these “new” items are probably tracked from the time I had the preferences set to automatically track topics I entered.
At least I could get rid of all those “unread” messages!
Oh duh, I forgot that Greenheart Games Discussion, as awesome as it may be, is not on our servers and thus, we don’t control the updates. 
The next time Discourse is updated to the latest version you should see the new button! cc: @Charlie
You made an old man happy 
