"New posts" oddness

[kamikasei]

I don't think this has been brought up elsewhere, but I've been away from the forums for a while so perhaps it's an old problem. My habit when browsing a forum had been to use the "go to latest new post" function to keep up with activity on a bunch of threads at once, easily. Now however it seems that, firstly, posts aren't getting marked as read properly in some cases; and, secondly, entire groups of threads are getting marked as fully read on some short timescale - less than a day - making it a pain for me to see whether a thread that interested me has not updated or has just been falsely flagged as read.

Is anyone else having this problem? Is there a fix or workaround for it? I use Firefox 2 and open threads in their own tabs if that might have any bearing on the issue.

[Jibar]

I know it does that for a reason, the whole automatically becoming read thing, but I can't remember why...

RAWHIIIIDE!

Get yo' can in action and lay down some beats so we can simplify this riddle, yo.

[Ikkitosen]

I believe it's to do with the forum considering you logged out for some reason, even though you don't log out and back in. Things go awry therein.

[Shhalahr Windrider]

To help reduce server strain the "Go to New Post" feature has been scaled back to work solely with cookies. This causes a few quirks in how your froum sessions are counted as the cookies are cycled, written, and re-written to your browser's cookie cache. This in turn causes much of the behavior.

Note, however that this behavior is identical to the tracking of threads with unread posts worked in the old YaBB software.

Note that this behavior has caused some confusion regarding Subscribed Threads. Many people used to only check their subscribed threads by using their User CP main page. This would show all subscribed threads with unread posts. Since automatic tracking of unread posts is now quite unreliable, it is now important to go directly to the Thread Subscription page and check the "date of last post" column or the threads themselves to be sure if there is new content.

[kamikasei]

I believe it's to do with the forum considering you logged out for some reason, even though you don't log out and back in. Things go awry therein.

That sounds like it could be the problem - I can't remember the last time I actually logged in to the forums, but if it's logging me out and back in automatically every time I hibernate my machine, that would probably account for things.

The failure to flag posts I have read, on the other hand, sounds like a simple bug either on the boards' side or in the browser's handling of cookies - but isn't that big a deal.

[Vonriel]

Yeah, if you'll look in your little GitP forum-colored box in the top-right, you'll see something like "You last visited: Today at 01:42 AM." When I'm browsing the forums, I only see new posts made since that time. I've noticed that if you're inactive for about 10 minutes or so, it'll log you out, or something, and since I assume people use the auto-login feature, it will automatically log you back in the next time you do something, and your time updates accordingly.

Note that this is the ramblings from a not-quite-tech-savvy mind, and prone to faulty information. These are just observations made from me.

[Ego Slayer]

The one thing that's been confusing me, though, is that, I think, when I'm logged in, if something is marked read, but before I check it someone posts, I open the thread at a random place, click the "last unread" button, it takes me to the last post I actually had not read, NOT the new post. :smallconfused:

I'm probably missing something here...

[Rawhide]

Don't open multiple threads at a time and you shouldn't have the 'not marked threads I have read as read' problem that often.

Threads you haven't read will be marked as read after a while, however you can leave the forum for weeks and all those new threads since that logoff should still be listed as new.