loss on "unread" information

[Harry Kuhman]

I just wanted to pass along that several times, including just now, I've seen the site lose track of what articles I still have left unread. Today's case is fairly typical: I came to the site this afternoon, saw that there were many forums that had new articles in them. I opened one forum. I started reading some of the new messaged. Something came up and I had to leave for about an hour. When I came back I finished up on the links from the forum. Then I went back to the main Knoppix forum list. But all of the forums now showed that they had no new messages, even though I could clearly see that their most recent message timestamps were more recent that the last time I had read the forum. Note that I never used the "mark all messages as read" feature (which I would hope applies only to the current forum anyway, but was not a factor never the less).

As I have seen similar operation before. maybe this is somehow an intended operation of the site, but I'm hard pressed to understand why it works this way.

[eadz]

It's just the way PHPBB works. Becasue you went away, your 'session' was lost, and i guess due to database design and cost of queries, it does not make sense to leave the messages unread forever until you either read them or click mark all messages as read as the database would get too big.

It does not store what messages you read, but when was the last time you came here.

So what the icons are showing is :
"new messages since last visit"

[Cuddles]

That makes sense...

I've had occasion to visit, see some posts that were flagged to read, read some, responded to some, etc... and either went to another forum, or came back later, to find, sometimes these flagged posts unread still, or, not flagged, like I had read them...

I was wondering what was making them "stick" sometimes, and other times, not "stick", time based, makes sense... Cause sometimes I can leave the site completely, come back, and the unread posts are still unread, and other times, they get marked that they have been read... I wasn't really putting much thinking into "why" this was happening, and the "flip-flop" way it seemed to decide this, but, looking at it with this knowledge, it makes more "programatical" logical sense, that it is being done by time, and I agree, the database would get "way" out of hand if it needed to keep track of this information... Considering I can come in here, and find a whole screenfull of unread posts from the last time I visited, if it didnt clean-up on its own, I could have five, or six, of these screens to go through, on an "extended" away.

[Harry Kuhman]

.......It does not store what messages you read, but when was the last time you came here....

You know, there's something that bothered me on a subconcious level about this statement. Finally today it came to the surface. I can open a group for the first time that day and see perhaps eight or nine new or updated posts. I can read any randomly selected four or five of them. Then I can go back to the forum and see what I have yet to read, only the unread posts will be colored as unread. So it must be storing what mesages I have read and what I have not, at least short term. If it was just based on a "last time you came" concept then either I would still see all the new post or none.

[eadz]

The messages are grouped by sessions... so when I say that the images show new messages, I mean new messages since last session, and it will store the begining time of your current session to use to get the new messages..

[Harry Kuhman]

.....I mean new messages since last session, and it will store the begining time of your current session to use to get the new messages..

OK, I'm still not getting it, since I can refresh a forum after I've read some new message and I only see the new ones that I have not read yet as new, not all the ones that were new when I open it, and not just ones that came in since I opened it.

But lets assume I'm just dense and lack some basic understanding here. Let me move on to a more important question. Clearly there is some sort of timer going on, since we all agree that if I open a group and come back a few hours later than messages that had been flagged as new will no longer be flagged as new for me. My problem is that this timer seems way too short - just a couple of hours or less. Knowing that this will happen has affected the way I use the site in two undesirable ways: I avoid visiting the site at all unless I expect to have some time to devote to it, and when I am on the site I find I spend more time than I would like (I don't go off and do other things, my previous mode of operation, since I don't want new mesages to "expire".) My question is, can this time interval that resets the new messages be changed, either by a setting in the individual's profile, or by a universal setting in the program, to a larger value? Two hours or less is just too short - I would hope for a value somewhere between 24 and 36 hours. That would give a user time to visit the site, see new messages, get called away (to dinner, to walk the dog, on any of those other little things called life) and still come back and not have new stuff expired, yet still allow the automatic expire thing to work as intended.

[eco2geek]

There's something else going on, too, something browser-specific. I'm stuck using Internet Explorer 5.5 at work (yuck!) because that's the only browser they'll install. I look at one thread, and blammo, everything's marked read, whether I've read it or not. Very discouraging.

Yet another reason not to use IE, as if you really needed one.