Topic read marking behavior

[Ectomorphic]

This is something I've wondered about for a while, but never got around to asking. The read marking behavior for topics and forum sections is unlike any other implementation of this bulletin board software I've used at other forums.

When reading a topic and getting to the end, if I go directly to the index page, that forum section and that topic will continue to appear as new and needing to be read (even if that was the last topic read for that forum section). When you go back into that forum section, the topic is still new. It's kind of misleading. What I have to do is, after reading a topic, make sure that I go back to the parent section first, then back up to the index. I basically have to backtrack my way through the tree step by step to make sure everything gets marked properly.

Normally, at other forums, when I read through all the new posts for a topic, it doesn't matter where I go from there. I can go back to the parent section or all the way to the index; either way it gets marked properly as being read.

I'm curious as to why this might be. I'm familiar with things like different time-out periods for marking topics and server side vs local read marking for topics/sections, but the particular behavior I just described seems to be unique to JSF, as I haven't noticed it at forums I go to that use vBulletin. Is this a setting of some sort? I can't imagine it being a bug, due to the uniqueness.

[John Stone]

I see what you are saying, and was able to duplicate the issue.

There are some new settings in vB that came about after version 3.5 that affect this behavior. I believe I've isolated and fixed the problem now. Thanks for mentioning it. Please let me know if things are working as expected now.

NOTE: The first time you come to the forum now that this change has been made all posts from the last 10 days will show as "new". This is because a new system for marking the threads as read or unread has been implemented. This is a one-time inconvenience. Just read as normal and then be sure to mark all threads read and things will work normally from then on (with the below caveat).

This change has the added effect of continuing to show any unread threads/posts as "unread" from one session to the next. Simply "mark all forums read" when you are done reading if you don't want previously unread threads/posts to show as such the next time you come back. After 10 days the system will assume you're not interested in threads that you have still not read, and will mark them as "read".

[Ectomorphic]

It's working right, now.

It's been like that for as long as I can remember. I'm glad it's fixed, but I guess I'm the only one who noticed the previous behavior.