Ignoring topics?

Is there a way to ignore topics? I couldn’t find one, but that doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist. And if it doesn’t exist, is it something that could be made to exist?

What I’d like is the ability to mark a topic as ignored (and while we’re at it, entire boards), and then, while I could still see the topic, the topic would always be considered read, so nothing in that topic would show up as unread for me. And I suppose the ability to unignore a topic/board would be useful, too.

-Kevin

This would indeed be very nice.

can’t you just, you know, ignore it?

The issue is that, if you read the board by using “unread posts,” then your search can get cluttered up with a lot of stuff you aren’t interested in and that can bury updates to posts you are interested.

For instance, my “unread posts” page has a huge backlog of questions about TADS that I haven’t read, because I don’t use TADS. Nothing against TADS, just my personal reading preferences. (Every so often I go to the TADS board and mark “all topics read.”)

I like this idea. It seems there are a few phpBB mods for this; is anyone willing to do some research and find a good one?

Just as useful would be a “Mark all as read” button on the Unread page. It seems very odd to me that you can mark all as read on any standard page, but not the page dedicated to exploring topics based on whether they’ve been read or not…

Well, it wouldn’t be quite as useful as the “ignore” – you’d have to keep hitting the button whenever a new post was made to the board you never read (or the trolling topic you’re sick of hearing of), and it wouldn’t allow you to selectively keep some topics unread (say if you were saving the Coloratura post-mortem until you got around to playing it). But it would be useful.

I consider both to be at the level of “every forum should have these minimal features”! So that’s the sense in which I find them equal. (I don’t selectively keep topics unread, so ending each reading session with “mark all as read” is pretty much equivalent to ignore for me.)