Posts which read themselves

chrise · Post by **chrise** » Fri Apr 06, 2007 10:13 pm

Hello,

I have noticed a rather peculiar thing on this forum - if I refresh the main page and see that there are new posts, then come back later to read them, the posts have often all been marked as read meanwhile. I am sure that it is not just me being logged out. Some messages do sometimes show up as unread afterwards - I think it is those which were posted after I checked for messages.

I find this rather annoying, as it means that once I have checked to see if there are unread messages, I have to read them within a few minutes or else make a note of which are unread so that I can check those later. This is especially troublesome when I want to quickly check before going off somewhere.

Has anyone else experienced this? Is there any way to stop it?

Christopher Elsby

John925 · Post by **John925** » Fri Apr 06, 2007 10:15 pm

That is a "feature" of phpBB.

chrise · Post by **chrise** » Fri Apr 06, 2007 10:17 pm

Then I would urge Patrick to look for any sort of patch that can remove this "feature", or failing that to turn to a different forum system entirely - although I appreciate that the latter especially would be very difficult to do.

dlcs18 · Post by **dlcs18** » Fri Apr 06, 2007 10:28 pm

I find it annoying because sometimes I accidently enter the forum twice at almost the same time, then, it would log me out, and when I log back in, it marks every post as read and I never know what new posts there are.

Blast!10 · Post by **Blast!10** » Sat Apr 07, 2007 4:40 am

I'm very rarely being logged out, but I DO experience that annoying thing that sometimes, when I go out of a topic and back to the forum index, IE shows "This page cannot be displayed" and all the nonsense after it. So I hit Refresh and then I see the forum index but all forums are marked read and I don't know what the new posts are!!

popo · Post by **popo** » Sat Apr 07, 2007 8:28 am

Explanation.

When you visit the board it shows new posts since your last visit. If you log out and go somewhere else, or close IE without logging out, or your connection drops as it does with me quite frequently, etc., then when you go back it's a new visit as far as the board is concerned so it only shows the ones which are new since you last looked at the page. If you didn't read them all it doesn't know or care.

So if you see there are new posts you have to read them then and there or the next time you visit they won't show up as new.

If you want to go to another site and come back and read them then you should use the back button to get back to the index page and they will still show as new posts, but don't log out in the process.

chrise · Post by **chrise** » Sat Apr 07, 2007 6:05 pm

How does the forum detect these "visits"? I am using Firefox, and I nearly always (24/7) have the forum index open in a Firefox tab. It doesn't say I've logged off, I don't have any "This page cannot be displayed" or equivalent nonsense, and I don't go to any other sites with this tab. The only thing I can see that it could be is a simple matter of time - you have X minutes once you look at the forums before all the posts get marked as read.

Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, the only thing that should get a post marked as read however much waiting and logging in and out you do is actually reading it![/b]

Muzozavr · Post by **Muzozavr** » Sat Apr 07, 2007 6:44 pm

I'm not having the this page can't be displayed, but although rarely, but pretty regularly it logs me out all of a sudden, I enter the address, then it refreshes the page, and I'm logged out. When I log back in ALL the posts are now read, even if they weren't.
This is annoying.

I'm using Opera 9.