Description of your request or bug report:
Set a book as “reading” and include a start date. Then change the book to “stopped”. If you now open the edit popup again, the start date is not set. I have no idea if that’s just a visual issue or if the data has actually be deleted.
Trello link:
Pretty sure the data has actually been deleted since when you start reading a stopped book again it replaces the start date with today’s date instead of the original start date
It is wiped. It’s not necessary to wipe it but then again i’m not sure how valuable it is to keep around. There’s some small nicety in only have start dates for in progress & finished books, but if there’s a want to keep the start dates for stopped books, we can.
As @meagstudies points out your start date is overridden if you ever resume reading the book.
Status of this request will be pending until we verify if we think it’s a problem or not.
What about “hold” and “stopped” status being different?
Stopped being more like dropped and not planning to pick it up again.
I’m really reluctant to add statuses without a very good reason… we already have more than you’re average tracking site. This seems like a small enough issue I don’t think it warrants adding another status, at least imo 
I agree, which is why you shouldn’t wipe the start date. By keeping the start date, Stopped can be used both as Dropped (permanently stopped) as well as Paused (temporarily stopped). Honestly, those two statuses on AniList have always been blurred for me (for anime). I’d sometimes use Paused for a series for months and then realize I’m never going to get back to it and move it to Dropped. (I use Paused for manga, but that’s different because AniList tracks entire series, not individual volumes. So I use that when I’ve run out of volumes I own, but the series still has more volumes. Not relevant for Natively.)
That’s my take at least. I’m not likely to use the Stopped status very often, so it’s not a huge deal for me.
I noticed that when I set a book to Stopped, it removes the Date Started info. I’m not sure if there’s a reason for that, but it frustrating to lose that info, and only be able to tell via the Data Manager or Activity log.
Duplicate
Merging to:
Bumping this for @brandon as it was recently created in another PR and this was left as pending.
https://forums.learnnatively.com/t/dont-remove-started-date-when-setting-to-stopped/4156
Ahh thx, and sorry for the duplicate!! I should have checked more carefully first
Don’t worry about it. As there are 100+ open now even some could slip through me even though I created all of them in Trello 
This request is approved.
I think the only addedum i’d add is that I add a ‘stopped_at’ date to the database model, which is auto populated when you stopped. This is cleaner than depending on a ‘date modified’ as that might not be accurate.
If you resume progress again, the ‘stopped_at’ would be wiped and the ‘started_at’ would be refreshed to the current date.
I think it would also be useful to surface the stopped date.
I have a couple books for example that I’d like to know how long has been since I’ve touched them and currently there’s no real way to tell other than digging the activity.
I wouldn’t do that. Some people might use Stopped for long pauses and then continue from where they left off. And generally I don’t think you should overwrite data since you can’t predict every use case. If the user is truly starting over they can reset the start date manually.
I agree with this. In fact this is the reason I’m so reluctant to mark things as stopped. I don’t want to have to remember my original start date.
If you automatically refresh ‘started_at’ to the current date, anyone who simply paused has to remember to return the ‘started_at’ field to what it was before (and if they forget to do this, they have to go through their history to remember what it was which can be annoying).
But if you retain the original ‘started_at’ data instead of repopulating it, all anyone has to do when starting the book over from the beginning is click set to today.
Accidentally fat fingered a book to stopped and sad my start date disappeared. This may come to preference, but I’m not sure why the “stopped” button has to be the biggest button and on the side you usually see OK/Cancel (this may be a apple vs windows thing). The mouse travel distance is also the shortest when having pressed “update”, so that’s where my focus naturally goes first.
I’m not sure stopping a book is so common you need a big shortcut button for it anyway?
I’m case you still need it, if you go to data manager, or filter activity on the book, you should be able to dig up the start date again. Works as long as you’ve been updating your pgs (if you marked something as Reading, but didn’t put any page progress in, then it won’t show up in data manager afaict)
You know that’s right, don’t know why I’d wipe it. Good idea and thanks everyone else for confirming that behavior too 
Hmm I usually expect actions on popup on the bottom right, but yeah I can understand what you mean. It is one of the common actions and I’m also not entirely happy with that UI … but perhaps fixing this behavior to not wipe the start date would render this issue minimal. Good to know though, that potential danger raises the priority of this fix!
Unfortunately this was the first time updating the book progress, so I had no data. If I mark a book as started, I usually only update it only after I’ve made some meaningful progress (like a week later, even if I read it every day). I don’t care about individual sessions or daily stats.
I think I was able to deduce the probable date by looking at my other activity, in the end. Maybe starting a book could create a entry in the data manager? Or is that just redundant duplicate data.
It just gets weird as a very common behavior is to:
So, it’s very common to have the ‘date moved into reading’ be much later than when they actually started it.
Basically, I think that isn’t a good idea
Let’s just fix this issue!
