Post detail view, allow different background for new comments

[Matth7878]

Is Your Feature Request Related to a Problem?

Going back to post view you can know how many new comments there has been since you last looked. Thunder also use a special style on age (adding stars and a different background color) to let user know which comments are new.

Still it's hard to quickly detect new comments when quickly scrolling. You are looking at left side of screen but indicator of new comment is a small element at right side. It's especially hard when there is a lot of comments.

Feature Description

It would help a lot if background color used for new comment age was not used only for age. Comment should use it as a whole for it's background color.

It would speed a lot detecting new comments and reading them as they would be easily spotted at a glance without having to look hard on right side when quickly scrolling.

Alternative Solutions

No response

Additional Context

No response

[micahmo]

I like this idea, and I'd take it one step further and say that by convention I would expect unread comments to be highlighted. What do you think? That way it's easy to open a post and read all the new comments you haven't seen yet (even if they technically aren't considered "new" by age). It also means that once you've read them, they'll no longer by marked as unread (even if they're still technically "new" by age).

I asked about this in the Lemmy repo and I think it would be possible for them to add an unread flag on the comment object. We can follow along here: LemmyNet/lemmy#2352

[Matth7878]

Agree I think it should be default when you look at a post you already visited.

In some other apps (boost for instance) they store when you last opened a post and use your timestamp to change background for comments after that timestamp. Even though it might be not perfect it's a breeze to get up to date and it's really nice!

[hjiangsu]

Thanks for the feature request! I do like the idea of keeping track of the last opened post timestamp. Having this information available could also allow us to keep track of recently opened posts (#1451)

For devs, we would likely want to create a new database table to hold this information.

As a sidenote and also for the sake of transparency, I am putting a bit more focus on improving the codebase and improving overall performance right now so it might be a while before I work on adding new features!