feature, home screen: Add ability to mark messages in bulk, mute topics etc

[jainkuniya]

Issue:

to feel fully caught-up, I have to open topics that I'm not interested in, and mark them as read. It'd be nice if I can long press on the topic and either mute them or mark them as read. Making this a bulk action, where I can select multiple topics and mark them as read would be even better!

Solution:

I'm imagining is that you long-press, and the result is the screen enters a "select several" mode. Like this:
https://material.io/design/interaction/selection.html

Read more at https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/stream/48-mobile/topic/muting.20topics.20or.20mark.20as.20read

[chrisbobbe]

A user in the Recurse realm, over here (only accessible to realm members, like @gnprice, Tim, and me), reports an experience where it wasn't clear how to mute topics/streams from mobile.

In a high-participation realm like the Recurse Center (or CZO, I suppose), it's especially important to be able to easily opt out of content you're not interested in. The user identifies the difficulty of muting conversations as a main reason they don't like or recommend Zulip. As an additional data point, I've often found the RC realm overwhelming; it's a common experience to need to quite actively weed out unwanted topics and streams just to get down to a manageable volume of content you can reasonably consume. (This may indeed be a factor in my recently not being very active on the Recurse realm!)

Another user points out to this user that you can mute topics from the message list while looking at a stream, by long-pressing the topic header—but that necessarily means marking some messages as read, which is unfortunate. It looks like that part is also covered in this issue.

From that discussion Vishwesh links to:

@gnprice said:

That sounds like a good UI feature to me, though it'll require some iteration and playing-with to get to a version that's really good.