[Announcements] Marking all announcements read

[oakc1946]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas LMS

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In the student interface, currently it is not possible to select multiple or all announcements to make them marked as read. As a result, often times a student's announcement thread will fill up to the point that they will no longer be able to notice when an instructor sends out an announcement, thus creating the possibility of a student missing out on something important. 

[nmacko]

Not only should we be able to "mark all as read", I think we should be able to unpublish an announcement without having to delete it. I can save my announcements in Sakai and re-use them at different points in the course. I would like to archive my announcements.  

[rdering]

It would be really helpful if there were an option for faculty to mark announcements as "read" to remove the notification icon on the dashboard.  When you have several classes but the same announcements are made in each class multiple times per term, it gets annoying to have to click on each one to remove the notification.

[GustafLindström]

As a student it would be great to have a feature that would enable us to mark all announcements in a canvas page as read (similar to some e-mail services) instead of having to open every single one of them. 

[FX_19]

Can this finally be implemented? It really is such an inconvenience to have to click on every announcement just to mark it as read. I prefer reading my announcements via email so the need to click on the announcements via Canvas is redundant.

[ynthrepic]

Instructure really don't care about us. They're just in it for the money. Once you reach a certain size, the only community you listen to is the one that directly pays the bills.

We probably have to complain about this through our education providers if anything is ever going to change.

[RobertEidså]

It needs to be possible to mark all announcements as read. Becouse it is way to laborious to mark them manually if it is too many of them. How it works now is that you have to enter the announcement, and stay there for a few seconds and it will be marked as read. That process is too slow when you normally read the announcements as emails or as notifications and it is not needed to  enter it and read it fully, this results in a lot of unread announcements. The problem with this is that it makes the announcement almost useless, because there is always unread announcements when you enter canvas, some of them years old.

A quicker option to bulk mark as read is necessary, or at least a quick and easy way too mark them as read, for example just by clicking the little red dot. It should also be possible to mark as unread, or as important for later...

[dan_weaver]

It's disappointing that this basic feature is *still* not available. What are your devs even doing?

[mfxuus]

2022 and we still can't mark all as read! At this point I think I need to be that guy who tries to get a dev job at Canvas, implement this feature, and quit right afterwards 🙄

[ynthrepic]

@mfxuus I swear they must be a shell company. No innovation in years. Just passive income for the investors.

[samueldy]

@ynthrepic, I have a professor who's really experienced in web development, and he told me the situation is a little chaotic at Canvas right now. Canvas is a Ruby-on-Rails app. Frameworks like Ruby on Rails, Django, Next.js, etc. are not built for performance -- one of their key goals is to minimize the time a developer has to spend to implement a new feature, because these are the metrics that matter to startups trying to get investor funding. Years later, though, Canvas has become so widely adopted that Instructure is now dealing with huge scalability issues. Scaling Ruby on Rails usually has to be done horizontally, and Instructure is currently one of the largest consumers of AWS resources. My professor claims that because of this, Canvas has never really been profitable. They're in the process of rewriting Canvas to use more of a microservices architecture, in which I imagine each piece could be heavily optimized to become more vertically scalable.

Vertical scalability isn't something a lot of web devs plan for early on, because there's pressure to use an "easier" framework to get your content in front of investors sooner. But it may be the difference between paying for thousands of AWS instances or a few large servers each months. (I heard that StackOverflow runs a C++ backend that can serve however many millions unique hits/month they get on just 3 servers.)