Zulip main stream UI feature request: Show only first message from most recent topics

The more I’m using Zulip, the more I’m loving it 😃

I have maybe just one minor complaint. This may be a feature for others, but it is a minor annoyance for me because of the frequency at which I visit Zulip.

I don’t spend too much time on Zulip, and when I do spend time I’m usually reading the topics in the stream I’m currently working on. However, I’m subscribed to a bunch of other streams that I’m interested in.

After not visiting a stream for a while, my streams looks like this:

If I click on a particular stream, i.e. in this case helpdesk, I can see that these are the most recent chatted topics:

This is what I get when I load all more topics (which is something I almost never do, I’m sharing for illustrative purposes):

I think this is all great. It gives me a quick summary for the topics being discussed.

However, when I clicked on that stream, the center pane updated and is now filled with messages from every topic and shows me recent messages in the topic that I haven’t begun reading on. This is an example of what I am seeing (I’ve removed names and pictures for privacy reasons):

For example, in this image, there’s many messages from the Requirements Subtype topic. I might be curious about this topic by its name but my interest is largely decided my the first message in the topic, after which I’ve decided I’m not interested in reading any further. All follow up messages shown here are not interesting to me.

Additionally, the messages from the Requirements Subtype topic is interleaved with messages from current best choice for higher-order AD. This makes the view currently the way it is set up not helpful, since the people that are chatting in these individual topics have that topic open when they are chatting and are replying in context.

This makes it such that every time I click on a stream name in the side bar, the content view in the center pane is pointless (to me).

I then click on the individual topic (based on the topic name of interest) and read from top to bottom. And I make this decision largely based on the topic name. Usually after I read the first message (or the first couple of messages) in the topic, if I realize it is not something I’m interested in at the moment I switch to a different topic.

For me personally, my experience using Zulip would be much more enhanced if when I clicked on a stream, the center pane only showed the first message in each topic in that stream.

This is my silly preview mock up for what I’d like to see instead (maybe with a indicator that there are more messages below):

People can click on the topic name in the center pane to open the individual topic.

I’m sure other people like it and prefer it the way it is now, but I’m interested in having the option to customize my interface if possible.

I looked through the settings on Zulip, and I didn’t find such a feature. Does anyone know if this is currently possible? If it is not currently possible, would it be possible to consider is as an option / feature that a user can turn on?

[amanagr]

We have talked about having this as a part of recent topics. Not sure how long will it take for it to be available. Thanks for your feedback.

[richardreeve]

I’ve just seen this issue and I would also find it very useful feature for some streams. I’d just like to be able to switch to it and back or configure it per stream. The problem is that some (e.g. helpdesk-like) streams that I am in principle interested in move too fast, and I always just find myself lost in a maze of interleaved responses even though the majority of streams I read are up to date and I’m happy to read them as they currently appear.