If you access the only "new" thread in a board through the "Last Post" link on the main page instead of viewing the thread listing first, the "new" status of the board does not update. Thus, the board appears to have new posts in it when there are in fact no new posts.

Not sure that any of this would be relevant, but:
Browser: Opera 10 Linux
OS: Ubuntu 10.04 Beta

I am aware of this issue but am yet to come up with a suitable fix.

It is annoying though so I'll leave this here to remind me to take another look at it.

I had a thought, not sure how you decide if a board is unread or not, but surely you could check if there are "new" posts in that board? :/ Ie. Times of viewing the threads within etc...

Posted By Michael on 3rd May 10 at 3:25am

 

I had a thought, not sure how you decide if a board is unread or not, but surely you could check if there are "new" posts in that board? :/ Ie. Times of viewing the threads within etc...

Something along those lines. The idea is to get/store that information without overloading the server with queries. With the number of pageviews we get across the system we don't want to be requesting unnecessary information all of the time, especially not when it has to query large sets of data (think of the kinds of queries that would have to run on the homepage of a large forum [say 3000 topics across 20 different boards] which gets 1000 views a day). I think it needs to somehow check if the parent board should be marked as "read" or not whenever you view a recent topic within it - that way the query only gets run for members who are viewing an unread topic and would only be done for one board at a time. I've just got to workout the specifics of how best to do it

if ($POST["via"] == "recentpost") {
boards[$GET["board_id"]].markRead();
}

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Obviously I'm just making the stuff up, and it's been a long time since I used PHP, so forgive my syntax.

Every forum host I have seen/used it's been like this. I also did point this out 2 years ago on this forum, but I cannot remember what was said.

Posted By webmaren on 3rd May 10 at 8:06pm

 

if ($POST["via"] == "recentpost") {
boards[$GET["board_id"]].markRead();
}

---

Obviously I'm just making the stuff up, and it's been a long time since I used PHP, so forgive my syntax.

I had a little more of an in-depth look at it tonight and there are several challenges to overcome.

Method 1. We could check if the post you are viewing is the current "Most Recent" one. However, there could still be other (slightly older) unseen/unread topics in the board so marking it as read would be wrong.

Method 2. We could check if there are topics in the board which you have not read, but that's not to say you haven't seen them (by "Seen" I mean seen them listed inside the board but not read them - we just don't store that information)

So what we really need to do is check the time you viewed each board (so that information needs to get stored somewhere) and check if there are any posts created after that time which you haven't yet read. Sounds simple but that requires information which is not currently stored. It'll require a rework of several systems to become feasible (including the homepage, view board, view topic, mark as read and bump topic systems off the top of my head). Hopefully we'll be able to make it happen (I can see several related features which could be added) but it'll require longer to do

Actually, all you need is the last access time for the board and the time that the most recent post/bump was made. Mark as read should also update the last access time. You don't really need to see if there are multiple new posts after the last access.

I've been doing some testing on this and, so far, things appear to be going quite well. It turns out that in some places I had been quite sensible with the original system - making it easier to update. It's still very early tests but I should be able to include a fix to this in the next batch of bug fixes