Slightly realated, but different: Highlight already visited questions and Highlight new entries on inbox.
There are many areas on the SE network where new activity is brought to your attention: replies go to your inbox, the default answer sort order is by activity, etc.
One area where new activity is not clearly identified is when you revisit a question. New answers/comments are, for all intents and purposes visually identical to old posts.
Currently we, as users, have two options:
- Try to remember which posts we've already read
- Try to remember the last time we visited the question, and mentally filter the old posts from the new
I'm not convinced either of these is practical, especially when you read potentially hundreds of posts a day on multiple sites in the network.
I'd like to propose a new feature to help identify what the new activity is within a question; this might be new highlighting, some kind of badge on the item, or whatever.
This is closely related to Make recent activity and responses show new comments on questions/answers I have commented on (even if I don't own them), but I'd like to have a way if identifying the specific new activity on previously visited posts that I may not have commented on or answered. Now, if this means I have to favourite the question, or flag it in some other way to be notified, I can live with that.
EDIT: Obviously, if this happened by default for every user and every post, it would represent a significant load on the SE infrastructure, which is why I'd be happy if it was something I had to specifically request on specific questions that I'm interested in.
I'd even be happy for it to expire after, say, a month of no activity on a question to minimise the load on the infrastructure.