Marking read articles (was Small complaint about M-g)

[Chris Brierley <brierley@pobox.com>]

On 2000-02-22, Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Großjohann) wrote:
> Jussi Yli-Urpo <jmy@h32.erkki.ton.tut.fi> writes:
> 
> > This was one of the reasons I eventually turned off marking
> > selected articles automatically as read.
> 
> Some of the users at our site use something which ticks a
> message when it is read, rather than marking at as read.

This thread gave me an idea.  I generally like the default
behavior of Gnus, i.e. marking read articles as read/expired and
not showing them to you again.  But, occasionally I get caught by
this.  I go to an article, before I'm done reading it something
comes up, and without thinking I quit the buffer (or whatever), do
the something else, and I've "missed" that article because it's
now marked as read.

I just thought, wouldn't it be nice if there was an option to only
mark the current article as read *after* you've completed reading
it.  E.g., when you hit 'n', the article you were reading is
marked as read, and the new current article is not marked as read
until you leave it in some way ('n', 'N', whatever).  So, it's
still automatically marked, but there is less of a chance of you
"losing" an article you haven't read thoroughly.

Off the top of my head I can see that it might be difficult to
decide what constituted "read completely".  For instance, what
would you do on the last unread article of a group?  Normally
hitting 'q' should not mark the current article as read because
you might not be done with it, but, for the last article in a
group you'd need it to.  Hrm.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this, or ideas on how to
implement it?

Just thinking.