Longer (or configurable) duration for topic read comment tracking
This data is retained for 30 days. After not visiting a particular topic for 30 days, the data about your last visit to it will be deleted.
We've had discussions before about long-lived topics, resurrecting old topics, etc. and the general consensus is that they were good and encouraged. Unfortunately, with the limited 30-day memory for topic read-vs-new comments, resurrected posts become a real pain. The current activity-sorted all-time front page has three topics from 2018, each with over a hundred comments. It'd be nice to read the new activity, but that takes either some tedious Ctrl+F with various terms ("minutes", "days", etc.) to find newish comments or re-reading everything.
I'd like to avoid relying on a third-party extension to handle this (browser and device support, issues with syncing multiple devices, etc.), and I understand the privacy goals. What are people's thoughts on making read-comment memory user-configurable, even if it's just "default 30-days" and "all-time"?
I'd rather not increase the length of time the data is stored, but I'd like to make it so that you can just choose something like "mark comments newer than 1 day" (or any other time period) to easily find the new ones, which would work exactly the same as having a recent visit. This would also allow logged-out users and people that don't want the visit-tracking enabled to get similar functionality. There was a merge request partially done for this, but hasn't been completed yet.
In the meantime, you can usually find the new comments by either changing the comment sorting method to "newest first" (if the new comment is a top-level reply), or clicking the link below "Last comment posted" in the sidebar, which will take you to the newest one.