Getting posts marked as read.

torgo

New member
I'm seeing a couple of situations where posts that I have read (or marked as read) are still showing up as new. Not sure if it's just me or not, but it's pretty reproducible.

The easiest one to do is using the "Mark Forums Read" link at the top level of the forms. Originally this cleared out all the "New" indications for all of the sub-forums, but now it doesn't.

The other way appears to be linked to navigation order of pages. Following these steps:
1. Select a forum that has "New" posts.
2. Read all the new posts in that form.
3. Using the top navigation path, go back up higher than that form (for example, if reading in the "Site News" forum, go back up to "Nikonites", rather than going back up to "Site News"
4. At the top level, "Site News" will still have the icon coloration showing that there are unread posts.

Going back into "Site News" and seeing that there are really no new posts, and then navigating back up a level to "Nikonites" now shows that "Site News" has no unread posts.

But, if instead in step 3 you were to navigate back to the forum you were reading ("Site News"), and then go up to "Nikonites", it would display correctly, showing that there are no unread posts.

I've seen this happen in just about all of the forum areas, not just "Site News". Something to do with needing to visit the actual forum's topics page in order to actually get posts marked as read? I know things used to work where as soon as you read a post, no matter where you went to next, it was marked as read.

Not really an earth-shattering problem, but annoying for my style of forum browsing. I've experienced this on multiple computers (although both Macs; one running Safari 4 and one with Safari 5), so I don't think it's a cache/cookie problem. Any thoughts?
 

torgo

New member
I've reloaded the pages multiple times (F5 doesn't do much on a Mac for reloading in browsers ;)). Even tried logging out and logging back in a couple of times.

If you're not seeing it, I can try some other browsers and report back. Maybe I posted too soon, without doing due diligence for a bug report.
 

torgo

New member
I did more research, and it points back to it being a forum problem.

I fired up Firefox on the Mac (never used to visit this forum) and had the same experience.

Also used IE in Win XP (I feel dirty now), also never used to visit this forum. It gets interesting here. When I used Firefox, I read the single new post in the Telephoto forum as a test, and went back to the top level. And in Firefox it still showed unread posts in that forum.
When I first logged in with IE, it also showed unread posts in Telephoto. But when I went into that forum, it was the same single post I had read before in Firefox. There were no new replies between when I read it in Firefox and when I read it in IE.

So (without knowing how the forum works, really) it looks like the trigger is viewing the list of posts on a forum that actually marks a post as read for good. Until I go back and see in the post listing that it's showing the post as read, it's always marked as unread.
 

jdeg

^ broke something
Staff member
I see what you mean now - theoretically is should automatically mark the forum read if you read all the new posts in that forum, but I think the way it was coded by vbulletin people is to have the thread + forum as the read trigger rather than just the thread, which is confusing, I agree. Unfortunately there's nothing I can do about this without pointing it out to vbulletin and insisting that the logic is wrong.

To explain the cross browser behavior - Since marking forums read is cookie based and not database based you will not see the same forums read across different browsers and computers. In other words, the read status is tied to the user's session and not the user's account.

A little tip - to mark a whole forum read regardless of viewing the threads in it or not you can just double click the forum icon on the forum homepage.
forum_new-48.png
 

torgo

New member
Good to know I'm not going crazy. :)

Thanks for the double-click tip. For some reason, in my mind that seems like a better solution than reading a single new post, then going back to the post listing, then going back up a level.
 
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