Messages get marked as "read"

[chasbas]

When I log in to this forum to read messages, all the new messages are nicely highlighted and I can click on the button and go right to the posts I haven't seen yet. But if I don't read all the unread ones and I go away for an hour, when I come back everything is marked as "read", presumably because the board assumes since I was there and didn't read something then I must have wanted to skip them.

But this isn't true. I don't always have time to read all the new posts in one sitting, but when I come back later I have to manually keep track of which ones I read and which ones I didn't (especially difficult for multi-page topics). I had this same problem with the last incarnation of this forum, and I don't understand why this doesn't bother everyone else too. Does everyone always read every new post within an hour? Am I the only one who gets interrupted in the middle of reading new posts?

Or, as usual, am I missing something? I checked the Profile settings and nothing seems apropos. Surely it can't be that difficult to leave unread messages marked "unread" and have a button that says "Mark all messages read" for the times when I really do want to reset the pointers.

[ghisler(Author)]

The board marks all messages as read after one hour. Reason: most people don't read every single post, only those which interest them. If the forum didn't mark these as read, they would remain as new forever!

There is a solution for your problem: Install Mozilla or some other tabbed browser. Then middle click on the arrows of all threads which interest you, and they will open on separate tabs. Now you can read the tabs one after the other, even 1 hour later - it doesn't matter when.

[chasbas]

Thanks Christian. That would work, but my problem is that sometimes I'll go to the forum site, read one message, and get interrupted and have to go. I don't even have time to read through the threads and decide which ones interest me.

If you left it up to each user to decide when to mark all threads as "read" instead of marking them all after an hour, perhaps *some* people would never unmark all their messages, but at least the people who use the system as it was intended to be used would be able to keep unread messages marked as unread until *they* decided to mark them.

If this behavior is an option for you as the administrator, perhaps you could start a poll to determine whether people would prefer one method or the other? To a lot of people it may not matter, but since I get interrupted at work pretty regularly, and also at home pretty regularly, to me it would make a big difference!

[ghisler(Author)]

Currently the board software only allows to set this as a global variable, which is currently set to one hour. If cannot be disabled completely, but it could be increased, e.g. to one day or so.

What do others think about this?

[Leif]

Yup, "one day" would be better.

[ghisler(Author)]

OK, I made a poll here.