Inbox Redesign

[momijizukamori]

This post is for feedback for the redesigned inbox! As this is a redesign rather than a port, 'it's different' isn't useful feedback - please let me know how that difference is impacting you!

In particular, I'd like feedback from phone/tablet users, and from people who regularly get inbox messages in languages that use different character sets than English (languages that use Cyrillic, various East Asian languages, etc) - a lot of the elements of the redesign were meant to address problems with these.

Fixed Issues

• 'Unread' message filter missing from the navigation sidebar
  
• All entries are showing up collapsed, even unread ones.
  
• Odd word-breaking behavior in subjects and messages
  
• Action/navigation buttons are no longer in the footer as well
  
• Spacing between subject and timestamp
  
• Have to click on the checkbox rather than anywhere on the message to select it
  
• Expand/collapse does not work on read messages
  
• 'Delete all for this entry'/'Mark all read for this entry' does not work
  
• Selected messages aren't highlighted
  
• Intermittant weirdness/failures when using the in-message comment moderation tools
  
• The bottom message on one page is duplicated at the top of the next page
  
• Clicking a link in a message also causes that message to get marked as selected.
  
• Missing link to the beta comm in the header
  
• No confirmation dialogue for 'Delete All'
  
• Deleting messages via JS causes expanded/collapsed status to reset on other messages on the page.
  
• Current page button color is incorrect in all site schemes
  
• Not enough space between compose button and manage/refresh links
  
• Following reply link does not mark message as read
  
• Actions doesn't work with JS off
  
• Links in read messages aren't muted in color
  
• Images embedded in inbox notifications overflow badly
  

Fixed But Not Live

Known Issues

• Navigation buttons reflow in a kind of ugly way on some screen sizes
  
• Not enough space between action buttons
  
• Mark All Read button doesn't update text on press
  
• No warning when you've hit the max number of flagged messages (just silent failure)
  
• Left-clicking on message actions is slow and does not always correctly redirect.
  

Possible Tweaks

• Separate filters for comments and entries
  
• Wording for buttons
  

EDIT: A proposal for alternate button interaction, to cut down on the number of action buttons for people with JS on (no-JS would still get a slightly cluttered view):

• if nothing is selected, the two buttons are 'Mark All Read' and 'Delete All'
  
• if anything is selected, 'Delete All' becomes 'Delete Selected'
  
• if anything selected is read, 'Mark All Read' becomes 'Mark Read' (or possibly 'Mark Selected Read') - a mix of read and unread marked would get this
  
• if all selected are read, 'Mark All Read' becomes 'Mark Unread' (or 'Mark Selected Unread'
  

Comments

[dandelionblizzard]

In the new inbox, it doesn't tell you that you've reached the max number of flagged items. I just thought the flag feature was still a bit buggy, and didn't realize I had simply hit the cap.

[momijizukamori]

Oh weird, I'll look into why it's not showing the message!

[pangolin20]

I would like to report a bug with the inbox (I am using Firefox 121.0 on Windows 11).

• The quick-action links (Reply and Link) for comments do not act at all, or act with a notable delay.

• The quick-action links for messages (Reply, Subscribe to [journal], Mark as Spam), do not act at all, and only collapse the message after a few seconds.

• The same happens with the quick-action links for entries.

Right-clicking them and opening them in a new tab works fine, though. I think the issue lies with connecting the action to the clicking of the link?

I'm using canary, but this persisted when I turned off canary and cleared the browser cache. Could you look into this and try to fix it?

[momijizukamori]

I think this is a side-effect of trying to replicate the behavior where clicking on the action link marks a message as read in addition to performing the action :\ Thanks for catching that it's straight-up not working at all for messages though! I'll see what I can do to untangle this....

[pangolin20]

Thank you!

[mific]

The other major issue with the "mark all read" button is that it used to mark 'all read' in the entire inbox. Now it just does it for the visible page, which is a huge pain in the ass when there are, like, 200 unread! (Not actually unread tho as I will have seen all in email notifications). Thanks for your efforts, and please fix this!

[momijizukamori]

What browser/OS are you using? It's working fine for me in up-to-date Firefox on Windows - if you have a LOT of messages (I just tested with ~2k) there's a noticeable delay, and we could maybe indicate that better, but it did finish.

However, if you've selected a message on the page, the 'Mark All Read' button is replaced with 'Mark Read', which only acts on selected messages. Redesigning for more varied screen sizes made the already extremely-crowded button section basically unmanageable if they were all displayed at once, unfortunately.

[mific]

Ah, that's the issue. In the old system the "mark all read" button worked even if messages were selected. In fact my recollection was that I had to "select all" messages before hitting the "mark all read" button, but that may have been a misunderstanding on my part.
Adding a note at the top to not have any messages selected when hitting the "mark all read" button would help.
I don't think the small delay matters, but I guess any note could explain that.

[pangolin20]

I've just discovered a new issue with the Gradation inbox:

If you've selected an item, the background changes, and it looks like this:

The links in this entry are quite hard to see against the background... Maybe changing the background to be much lighter would help? The contrast needs to be larger, at least.

I'm using Firefox 123.0, and I'm on Canary.

Thanks in advance for looking at this!

[rezni]

just a quick question:

in the new inbox, when i am in the unread tab and hit refresh, the page will refresh but it will take me back to the all tab rather than remaining in unread.

not sure if this is working as intended. in the old version, i could hit refresh and stay within the same tab rather than having to navigate back each time i used the refresh link.

[ffutures]

I've got a Firefox(?) bug where trying to reply to a message on the Beta page doesn't work. I have no idea how long this has been happening, my last message before yesterday was in 2020, although it's possible I've deleted some! I'm using Firefox version 132.0.1 on Windows 10. It worked perfectly when I switched back to the old version.