Thank you @Matth78 for going this deep in trying to understand me. It seems you’re getting close to it.
I consider the Inbox list to be the waiting list of episodes to decide on whether to listen to or not. The actual queue is my waiting list for episodes to listen to. At the same time I also consider the Inbox list to be a list to review and clear. I’m well aware that I’ll never ever clear it globally, but I do keep it clear for feeds in some folders and work towards clearing the list for other folders. That is, I use different folders for feeds fully tracked, feeds to be cherry-picked, feeds to be caught up on from their starts, feeds to possibly consider in the future and finalized feeds.
You are making a strong point for having some kind of way to ignore episodes. What I’m opposed to is making ignore a too central part of the work normal flow.
As of currently, I would describe the state transitions as in the following picture:
On Feed Addition the user currently has no control to place episodes new to the listener as new to AntennaPod. One single episode pass through F2I into the Inbox, all else forcefully goes through F2N to Not played. I realize increased ability for placing episodes in the Inbox would also require fixing automatic download of episodes, but reworking that is another ongoing other thread. I, who do not use automatic episode downloads, have manually placed new episodes into the Inbox ever since folders were introduced through modifying the database with some SQL. That has been fully successful and an improvement for my usage, even considering the hassle of manually exporting and re-importing the database whenever adding a feed.
What I’m suggesting is making it possible to manage the Inbox so that most people would be able to get a simplified state diagram such as this:
Generally people would know when adding a feed whether they intend to listen from the start or skip all old episodes only caring about newly released once. Please consider e.g. RTHK’s eating smoke or CBC’s a death in cryptoland. Those two are short series, who everyone adding them would want to hear from first episode to last. No new episodes will ever be released for either of them. (They are also essentially timeless and I would recommend them.)
My attempt to illustrate how I understand what is suggested in GitHub with adding a Skipped (or Ignored, renamed to keep initial letters unique) state is as follows:
It becomes a hell of a lot more complex, with all those state transitions for normal use. The more I think of it, the more I’d consider Skipped to be handled and implemented more like Favorites. That is, as an external flag.
What’s missing in the sketches above? I could make the source svg file available if someone is interested in adapting them with details.