Heads up: new Discourse functionality could be a game changer

I just discovered a new feature of Bookmarks, added by the Discourse devs and brought to Edgeryders, I imagine, by an update. Now you give can each bookmark a title, and above all set a reminder for each bookmarks.

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Use case: I need to sit in a meeting to pitch a client. Someone posts a topic with relevant ideas or other material. I don’t have the time to process it right now, but can bookmark it; use the bookmark’s title to remind myself what I want to use the topic for; and set a reminder. When the time comes, Discourse sends me a notification. If I only need to use the topic once, I set the bookmark to delete itself after sending me the notification.

This is very cool. I have almost stopped using bookmarks because they accumulate into a superlong list that I cannot do anything with. But now, I can use them to organize my work flow within Discourse, with no need to use task lists or calendar events. For more information, see the announcement topic on Meta.

A person on that topic had requested a feature to be able to share bookmarks. I did that too, because it would be superuseful to set reminders for colleagues. This could potentially get us out of Google Calendar.

FYI @company

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Interesting find! Hadn’t seen this myself, yet.

There’s also the “Defer” button close to “Bookmark”. It puts a topic back into the “New” or “Unread” tabs on the Discourse frontpage, and also redirects the user there. So it’s less powerful than the new bookmark feature, but also simpler (one click).

I propose we try this new bookmark feature to see how it fits us as a replacement for calendars and, also, task self-assignments. We might then eventually retire the use of calendars, Dynalist (meant for tasks but not used these days) and of the Kanban Discourse plug were topics representing tasks can be moved between lists.

Uh… I must be getting dumb, cannot find this one.

It doesn’t look like this on your end? :thinking:

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Actually no!

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Update: this morning I put another question on Meta, because it is important to understand how the notifications are sent. The game changer is the email notif, though in Edgeyrders we do tend to work with a tab always open on Discourse.

I also have a question. Is there a way to set notification preferences for the reminders? I created one on this topic to test the functionality, and this morning I had received the e-mail notif from your reply above, but not the one from the reminder. The latter does show up in the usual way on the site itself, clicking on my avatar.

Found it. There’s a user setting that allows you to enable the “Defer” button:

User profile → Preferences → Interface → Other → Enable defer to mark topics unread

I also found a global setting “Enable defer topic functionality by default.” which I enabled now. So now, everyone should see the Defer button.

From the current wording of the interface, it seems there is not, and that reminders would not send e-mail notifications. Because when you look at the relevant setting under “user profile → Preferences → Email”, it still reads: “Send me an email when someone quotes me, replies to my post, mentions my @username, or invites me to a topic”. So, it does not mention e-mails for reminder bookmarks.

But try changing that setting to “always”. If bookmarks do send reminders, you’ll see one when the next reminder comes up.

I guess that will only work for new users, no? It did not make it work for me, I had to change my own settings.

I can do it as a test, but “always” is too many emails for me. I think the reminder functionality works especially well when paired to email notifs.

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I had to enable Defer in prefs as well.

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as promised @Lee