Forums "read themselves"

flamechocobo · Post by **flamechocobo** » Tue Apr 20, 2004 11:07 pm

Every time I go into a forum then go to a different site from RLF and come back all the forums seem to be read... How can you fix this?

billf · Post by **billf** » Wed Apr 21, 2004 12:21 am

I'm not 100% sure what causes it, but after a certain number of posts, or after a certain amount of time threads are automatically marked as read, even if they haven't been.

enisoc · Post by **enisoc** » Wed Apr 21, 2004 12:26 am

I get that too sometimes. I don't know what causes it exactly, but I do know that the information about posts being read/unread is primarily stored in a (browser-side) cookie that is set to expire when the browser is closed ("at end of session"). Other than this cookie, the only information used to determine if a post is read or not is a comparison between the post time and the time that your current forum session began (i.e. when you last logged in or were autologged in by a cookie that stores your username and password). This means that logging out or closing the browser is equivalent to marking all posts as read.

flamechocobo · Post by **flamechocobo** » Wed Apr 21, 2004 12:45 am

Another problem is that sometimes old, OLD forums just jump to the top of my list... I don't know why, or how, but they do it for some reason...

enisoc · Post by **enisoc** » Wed Apr 21, 2004 1:12 am

What do you mean by old forums?

flamechocobo · Post by **flamechocobo** » Wed Apr 21, 2004 1:21 am

Forums that are almost a year old will just go right to the top of the forum list.

dmpotter · Post by **dmpotter** » Wed Apr 21, 2004 4:01 am

I assume you mean threads or (as phpBB calls them) topics.

And I've never seen that happen - unless you're referring to the original topic date, since the topics are sorted by the date of the last post to them. So a topic originally started a year old can easily float to the top if someone posts to it.

The only other possibility I can think of is that somehow you're winding up on the some page beyond the first page, so you see a list of really old topics - but that's because they've fallen off the first page onto one of the following ones.

flamechocobo · Post by **flamechocobo** » Wed Apr 21, 2004 9:36 pm

Yeah, topics...
And what I mean is that even without someone posting in them they will just go right to the top of the list (not counting stickied topics)... It is kind of bugging me as to why it is happening, but it isn't really a big problem...

enisoc · Post by **enisoc** » Wed Apr 21, 2004 9:40 pm

[quote="flamechocobo";p="323770"]And what I mean is that even without someone posting in them they will just go right to the top of the list (not counting stickied topics)...[/quote]
Are you sure they're not polls? Do they stay at the top when you refresh? Are you sure they haven't been posted in, but have marked themselves read afterward? I really don't see how what you say could be physically possible... or rather, electronically possible.

flamechocobo · Post by **flamechocobo** » Wed Apr 21, 2004 10:17 pm

No one has posted, and they are not polls. Well, there is one thing... My time and date went all whacky when it happened... Maybe that screwed it up...

ChronoSword · Post by **ChronoSword** » Wed Apr 21, 2004 10:19 pm

When you say that noone has posted, you mean around that time or at all. Maybe you are viewing unanswered topics or something.

Post by **Martin Blank** » Fri Apr 23, 2004 3:39 am

The loss of information can be caused by a bad cookie. I've seen it happen here and at work (we have a phpBB forum there, too). Try nixing your cookie and logging in again, and see if it works. A mention of the affected browser could shed some light on things, too; Mozilla/Firefox's cookie handling seems to be different in some aspects from IE's, for example.

The stuff appearing up top... That sounds like a browser cache issue, really. I've seen some really ancient stuff in cache before. You may be clearing it out on a regular basis, but the threads shown are shown based on server time, not local computer time. The server doesn't know and doesn't care what time you think it is.

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