Provide the ability to mark an article as "Read"

As a reader, I would like to have the ability to mark an article as “Read” so that I track what I’ve read and what I’ve not read.

Technically, it’s possible do this by automatically tracking how much (%) the user scrolls down on an article, but it would be better to give the freedom to the reader.

Another option is to have both, and allow the reader to mark an article as “Understood.”

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Having read/listened to DN33 for months, I find myself uncertain about ever checking “Understood.”

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Hi Chanaka and welcome to the forum!

When you say

are you talking about posts on this forum or content (sutta) on the Sutta Central site?

This forum does exactly what you ask, the titles of the topics you have read are displayed with a lighter shade of gray, and when you select a topic you always land on the first unread post.

You can also bookmark a specific post (just look under the tools below each post).

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Hi, Musiko. I was referring to the content in the Sutta Central site.

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True. Then as:

  • Want to read
  • Reading
  • Completed reading
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Ah. Thanks for the clarification. This actually would require a login to maintain a personal record of your choices. An alternative would be cookies which the site could ignore but which your browser would acknowledge. Cookies would not go with you from device to device. It would also require your approval to add such information since it falls under personal information and that is subject to EU regulation. Confidentiality comes into play as well since this is personal information. For example, one might use such information to create statistics of user sutta preference, etc. So the feature requested actually has quite large implications. For example, Amazon might use such information to infer that people who like sutta X also like to buy product Y. Therefore, although quite a useful feature, it is actually complicated to solve ethically.

Anagarika @sabbamitta, this might be one for the Voice backlog.

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Which of these options do you mean?

Although I am not sure that @chanakavp was actually meaning to use this feature on Voice, but rather on the SuttaCentral main site, it is still an idea to implement such a feature in Voice, of course. :grin:

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I see. Similar requests were discussed here before and it seems Bhante @sujato has a very firm view on this kind of issues:

I don’t know if you have already seen these topics, perhaps they will help clarify some points for you.

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Perhaps it is, perhaps it isn’t, as you can tell from Bhante Sujato’s prior responses, there is some pushback.

However it is a recurring issue that has yet to be solved well to all users satisfaction. Indeed, I regularly “lose a few suttas” and cannot get back to them. I usually have memorized the sutta numbers I care about. And I also let Voice find whatever else I need. So the tagging feature may actually never come up in the context of Voice.

But sometimes I lose track of the proper phrase to find a sutta I want to remember. For example, I know to search for “vital conditions” if I cannot remember “sn12.23”. If I forgot both, I’d be lost and unhappy. So we should keep this need in mind and discuss it over the long term as we come to understand what Voice users may need to recall the suttas that are important to them. This was actually part of the Examples/InspireMe feature set, that we make all the common phrases known to all.

I am not happy with Chrome bookmarks. Google always messes with my bookmarks and throws them away for no good reason other than they are giving me “better technology”. :roll_eyes: Google has simply lost my trust. And even if bookmarks worked, there is, I think, a somewhat larger opportunity here to explore beyond bookmarks. For example, since Voice can find suttas by phrase, many of us have found multiple suttas that address any given topic. This diversity changes the notion of how we study the suttas. This “study by searching” is potentially richer than bookmarking. Indeed, perhaps users might want to organize a history of their searches. These are early days yet, so all of this post is just a bit of an inconclusive ramble.

For the backlog we might just say “How do I find/annotate a sutta I am currently studying?”

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