To clarify, I’m not talking about notification emails. That appears to be functioning fine. But since migrating to the new Private Message System (v1.0.17), while feedback is quite positive regarding the layout and responsiveness, a number of users have expressed concern about how to tell which messages remain unread.
One member insisted she was not seeing messages for which she was being notified. Troubleshooting this issue I noticed that the small number for unread messages within the Inbox button at top does not update until the PM page is refreshed. Oddly, however, I confirmed that marking a private message as unread does update the number without requiring a page refresh. So for this user, I believe she was indeed reading all messages but assumed there were more she was not seeing because the number did not update.
In figuring this out, I noticed there is no indication of unread messages in the list of threads on the left. When there are multiple threads in the inbox, this makes it difficult to identify which thread has the unread topics. There is a running total number of messages next to the subject for each thread. If this number could be colored, or the thread highlighted in some other way, it would be much easier to manage which threads have unread messages. And if the specific unread message had an alternate background color until read, that would just be keen.
Finally, I’m not certain about this, but it appears the PM System assumes you have read all new messages if you visit the Private Messaging page. Without clear indication of which threads have unread messages, however, I’m not sure if this is the case. If so, it would make sense to keep all messages and notification numbers marked as unread until the individual unread message has been displayed.
Hopefully this can be considered a feature request and is not identification of some unexpected behavior. Since the plugin seems to be using it’s own css, I doubt I could try to address this with theme hacks, but I’m happy to try or help test if given direction.
As if y’all didn’t have enough to do…
Of course, I am presuming marking a message as unread should result in the same behavior as receiving an unread message, but I went through this exercise after sending a few messages back and forth between two accounts and noticing the issue.