New Messages! (Read 1047 times)

Actually, there's a little icon and an arrow when there are new posts: If you click on the time stamp, it will bring you to teh latest post of the last topic in that folder. Once in the folders, there's an icon for new threads. Clicking on the date stamp brings you to the latest unread in that thread. It took me a while to figure those clicking on the time stamp tricks. I figured it out right before I asked Eric for it; I was literally opening the feature requests to type it in a couple of weeks ago when I got it.

As it is now, I have to look at the "last post" time of each forum and correct for GMT.

What Blaine said. Plus, if you go to options->Locale Settings and set your time zone - you won't need to correct for GMT.

I've noticed the flaky icon behavior too. Maybe it's a mac, or browser issue for us?

That might be, those icons are not too reliable in my experience.

I don't rely on the icons, so can't comment on their flakiness. I use Firefox, and when there are new posts, the latest post link color changes when their are updates in that board. I find this to be pretty reliable - the only flakiness occurs when I eat pie.

The icons are displayed next to threads that are modified since the last time the server thinks you've logged out. Unless you explicitly log out, the server has no definitive way of knowing what you're doing. You could have closed your browser, or you're reading a very long post. All web servers infer what you're doing by keeping track of your activity time (or more specificially, a timeout). If you do not fetch another page from the server within a time limit, then the server thinks you've left. The next time you comes back, the server will mark all posts created since then as new. So, if the icons don't display properly for you, it probably means you're here often enough that your session is never timed out. This behavior is not affected by your browser type since everything is done on the server side. As far as I can tell, it is working properly. You can do what I do, just look at the color of the latest post link. If it indicates I haven't visited a particular link, then it means I haven't read it yet. I'll come up with a better layout that will include latest posts after I'm done upgrading the log.

Sure, sure. But the PHPBB bulletin boards use a different method that seems a lot more accurate. Every time I look at a post, the icon changes. But I think GPS and mapping updates are far more important...

They probably keep track of every individual thread you read. They can afford to do that because their software only does forums. This site does a lot more than just running forum software. Keeping track of what everyone's read will probably place an unreasonable strain on the server. Wouldn't you rather have the server be processing your GPS data instead?

Have you looked at the database schema? Do they in fact have a table to map users to the posts they read?