Threads with "unread" posts, again . . .

[Scientia]

I know I've mentioned this before, but why do the forums here suddenly mark EVERYTHING as read? And not just in the forum I'm currently in, but on EVERY forum at Civfantics? I've noticed this happens when I have a forum open and an inactive for roughly 5 minutes or so, and it happend again to me just now when I posted a reply to another thread. Sometimes it also appears to happen for no reason whatsoever.

This is my biggest pet peeve with this entire site. I really rely on the "jump to first unread message" feature a lot, and this is particularly useful on threads that have expanded to become many pages long.

I've frequented many other online web-based forums of various formats and I've never seen the problem as bad as it is here. It really takes the enjoyment out of using these forums, which is a shame, because I usually visit here every day

Does this happen to everyone else too? If so, what's your secret for coping with it?

If I had an alternative way that I could *see* only the posts that I really have not read yet, then I would be content. Does anyone have a solution or work around?

 

[Chieftess]

I just back out of the page (usually), so that it doesn't mark it as read. But, most times (for me), it won't mark them unless I leave the site, and come back.

 

[Knight-Dragon]

Yeah, it's a problem for me too. Then I would looked at the time of the last post, to see which posts I hadn't read...

 

[sabo]

yep I just cope with it and deal with it another way.

 

[Scientia]

I guess it bothers me more than it bothers others. As a programmer myself, I just expect the bar to be raised in terms of what technology can and cannot do - keeping track of which posts have been read should be trivial at best.

I really like the layout and functionality of what they use at www.dslreports.com. Apples and oranges, I know, but I never have problems there. .. .

 

[Thunderfall]

There is not much I can do, unfortunately. Let's just hope the next major version update vB 3.0 will fix this problem....

 

[Lefty Scaevola]

Souds like what is happening to scientia is he is getting logged off by some VBB fuction when inactive for a time period and then auto logged back on.

 

[Scientia]

Lefty,

That could be part of my problem - I "multi-task" when I'm online, reading some science and philosophy newsgroups, and several security and gaming web based forums - sometimes I may be inactive on CivFanatics for 5 - 10 minutes by the time I cycle back around. (Does anyone else do this?)

Old habits die hard, this is what I did before I had DSL, and I had to wait for pages to load

I do "browse with cookies" so if I'm being logged off I suppose the autologin would appear seamless on my end.

If it is a timeout feature, can the the length of time be extended to something more reasonable (20 minutes or so?)

 

[Dell19]

I have had the same problem before and it usually happens after an hour or two and then all the threads are marked as read.

 

[Lefty Scaevola]

Before the last couple of upgrades, the damn thing used to log me off every five minutes, often in the middle of a long post. Since I am a moderderator with access to control function, I can not set options to automatic log on, otherwise my children could get on with my log on. The cycling of log off at that time appeared to be sychronized to the rotation in the ad banners.

 

[Scientia]

I am compromising by changing my surfing habits a bit - limiting myself to fewer browser sessions, so hopefully my periods of inactivity will lessen and I will not be logged out. We'll see how it goes. . .