marked as read

Hi:

Sometimes, not all?, if I mark a forum "read", it will mark others, is it me?, or someone on the side?

Alex

Hi, Mr. Lancaster…

Yes, I’ve noticed something is a bit different too. Perhaps there was an administrative setting changed in the database.

dB

The way that threads are marked as read has always been problematic on every forum I have participated in. I have not experienced the problem described by Alex, where only one forum is specifically marked as read, but others end being marked as well. The problem I most often experience is marking forums as read and coming back later to find them indicating new posts when no new posts have been added. The most common cause of this behaviour is having more than one window open on the forum at any given time. The system seems to get confused when you mark posts as read in one window, and then go to another open window and access the same threads or forums.

I notice this alot with the Private Message system. If you use pop-ups to notify you of a new PM being received, it asks you if you want to open it up in a new window. This seems guaranteed to result in the PM not being automatically marked as read once you open it.

Ensuring that you never have more than one window open on the forum seems to solve the problem. However, I find this too much of a constraint on how I use the forum. Therefore, I end up just living with the problem.

Hi, Don…

I’m not sure if this is exactly what Mr. Lancaster is experiencing, but if I read just one thread and come back awhile later and refresh all the pointers are cleared for the unread ones as well. There’s a good chance that the database was doing this before, and I didn’t take any notice to it.

V/r,
dB

There is one other issue that I forgot to mention that leads to marking problems. In fact, it is probably the single biggest cause. That is, using the "back" and "forward" buttons on your browser to navigate the forum.

For example, if you mark a forum as read, or visit a new thread that vbulletin should then automatically mark as read, hitting the "back" button will take you to a cached copy of the forum page you were last reading before you made the changes. This confuses the hell out of any forum package since it now has conflicting states. Again, this form of navigation is so embedded in my browsing style, I have decided to live with the consequences. The alternative is to dicipline yourself to only use the displayed links on any given page to navigate.

Don:

I don´t use the back and forward buttons, and I have been careful to only use the page ones; It just did it again, I opened the General forum, read all, marked as read, got out of the forums, and when I came back, all the forums were marked as read.

Could it be something about the move?, it did not do it before.

Thanks, Alex.