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Robert Burkhead 810310
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Post subject: The Forum Lies To You...Really!
 Posted: Jan 20, 2010 - 08:32 PM
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Administrator
Joined: Nov 21, 2005
Posts: 649
Location: Phoenix, AZ
Status: Offline
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Here's something that's slightly annoying about how this forum works... something you might not have realized.
The unread topics markers lie to you.  
Here's the scenario... you log in to the site and hop on over to the forum. It's been busy, and there are 14 new posts since your last visit. You start reading them, but only get through three of them before you have to log off and go do something else. So that's 3 down and 11 to go at this point, right? While you're away it's a slow day and no one posts anything new. Later, you come back and you want to read through those remaining 11 posts that you didn't get to earlier. When you log in and hop over to the forum, however, it says that there's nothing new for you to read!
 Wha'happened?!
Well, the people who wrote the software for the forum that we use decided that the "unread" marker would be based on the date and time of your last visit. Basically, that means that anything you left unread during your last session will not show up unread again during your next session!
Yes, it has always been this way.
What can you do? Well, the first obvious answer is to read through all the unread topics that you are interested in before you have to go do something else. Unfortunately sometimes the real world beckons, and that's not possible. In those cases, there's not much you can do except look through the topics to see if there's anything you missed that is not marked as unread.
Can I fix it? I looked into it. I didn't write this code, so I'm not intimately familiar with how it all works, so I probably cannot whack in a quick hack to fix things up. (I looked at this possibility.) There are a few hack/mods out there in the wild written by others, but the reports on them seem to indicate that they're either buggy, or cause the administrator to do tons of extra work to maintain it.
After the much-ballyhoo'ed, but yet-to-be-completed upgrade of the site's core software, I may choose to move us away from this forum software to something else. Of course, there's no guarantee that anything else will be much better.
Oh, and one other thing. The "unread" indicators in the "Recent Forum Posts..." area on the home page work slightly differently, but just as badly. In case you were hoping there was no insult to add to the above injury...sorry! |
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Robert Burkhead (RB)
Jacksonville ARTCC
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