unread topic blue's?

secaman · Apr 9, 2006

is it just me or the unread topics no longet turn red?

jdrich48 · Apr 9, 2006

They turn red on mine.

SnoSheriff · Apr 9, 2006

Same here bud. They are red for me. See attached:

secaman · Apr 10, 2006

ok now they doin it!! :frown:

maybe i just read'em all??

or they were just reset or something!

Robert · Apr 10, 2006

I've had them return to normal if I sit on one forum for too long and return to the main forum page, even when I haven't read any other forums. Guess it doesn't like you sitting around for too long. Sno, any idea why this is?

SnoSheriff · May 19, 2006

Technical explanation by another programmer:

This issue has been discussed a few times before and is an 'expected' function.

The way it works is a timestamp is saved in your cookie for your last visit, say 12:45pm on Monday Feb. 20th 2006.

When you open the page it marks any message posted since that date and time as unread.

If you refresh the page it resets the time in your session to the current time, you can see this working at the top of any page in the forums where it says "Last Visit at time/date" and "Current time/date"

Any messages that were posted before the 'current time' will be marked read even if you have not read them. Meanwhile, it also keeps track of the individual posts you have actually read within your current session.

Basically to sum it up briefly, if you visit at 9am, then come back at 11am any messages between 9am and 11am are marked as unread. 15 minutes later it you refresh the window, only the posts from 11am to 11:15am will show unread, if they are infact unread.

Like I said, it's the expected way for the sessions to work with forums, although it's not the way you would think it should work. The main problem is that there's no way to store every message ID in a session and have each one marked read/unread to show 100% accurate results. Even if this was done in the database and not sessions where the storage capacity is less of a problem, you'd end up having a table full of message IDs for each user. On a site like this one where there are close to 6000 users and hundreds of thousands of forum posts, the tables for handling something that would be insanely huge. You could theoreticly have the forums store only the message ID's since a certain date, but you'd still run into the same problem eventualy.
Click to expand...

Hired_Goon · May 20, 2006

One forum I frequent has an option to reset your last visit time. Basically it brings up a dialog box that has two drop down boxes in it. First one has nubers second box has the words minutes,days,weeks,months. It allows a user to specify any amount of time to see old messages.

Click on ok and it refreshes the new post screen with messages in the specified time.

Should be easy but then I'm not doing it. :wink:

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unread topic blue's?

secaman Member

jdrich48 Member

SnoSheriff Site Owner Staff Member Administrator

Attached Files:

unread-1.jpg

unread-2.jpg

secaman Member

Robert Active Member

SnoSheriff Site Owner Staff Member Administrator

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