cangy
Member
From: 平安京
Registered: 2006-12-13
Posts: 372
Website
The forum "show new posts" function lists new posts since a few minutes after your last access to the forums. It'd be better if it showed new posts since the last time "show new posts" was selected (or just posts in threads that are newer than the last time the thread was accessed). As it is, if you bring up the forum page but wait a few minutes before selecting "show new posts" the last visit time has already been updated and there will be no new posts...
cangy
Member
From: 平安京
Registered: 2006-12-13
Posts: 372
Website
synewave wrote:
There's a moral in there somewhere 
yeah, well, I'm certainly not going to deny that!
the problem was I'd open the forums in a new tab and open a few other things at the same time, then promptly forget about the forums tab, then rediscover it some time later and click on "show new posts", then curse my forgetfulness...
so now I've just changed the bookmark to be the "show new posts" link directly
still, the behaviour of the system doesn't seem quite right -- it has a new posts function for each thread which seems to remember when that thread was actually read, so it would make more sense if the "show new posts" function was based on that instead of a fudge on the last visit time...
JimmySeal wrote:
If you go to the Index, you can click Show recent posts to see all of the posts in the last 24 hours.
thanks, that helps, but it's not quite the same...
Last edited by cangy (2008 January 31, 2:21 am)
ファブリス
Administrator
From: Belgium
Registered: 2006-06-14
Posts: 4021
Website
Hya cangy,
I'm sorry that is a limitation in the PunBB software. In fact PunBB remembers your last visit time, and uses that to compare against the time of all topics. So it does not in fact, remember when you read a thread. This is done for optimization purposes I assume. A forum could potentially have thousands of topics, and to have an intelligent "I have read this" checkmark as you have in your standard Email program, would require to store <number of unique users> x <number of unique topics> x <space required to store date> so it takes a lot of database space.
A possible improvement would be a manual "I have read all new topics" action, but then it imposes a manual action from the user, hence PunBB uses a time out that is set to 10 minutes in the default installation. If it's set too long, for example 30 minutes, then you can't get rid of the "new posts" indicator for that duration even if you finished reading all new posts..
There's a new version of PunBB coming along, I'll have to check it out in detail, perhaps this problem was addressed. I cannot update the forum with a beta version though, so will have to wait for a final release of the newer PunBB.
cangy
Member
From: 平安京
Registered: 2006-12-13
Posts: 372
Website
another way of looking at the problem is that whenever you visit the forums (to look up an old thread, say), you have to view all the new posts now, because you won't be able to do so later
ファブリス wrote:
A possible improvement would be a manual "I have read all new topics" action, but then it imposes a manual action from the user
I guess it would work ok doing it both ways. "view new posts since last visit" as well as "view new posts since last marked read" and "mark all as read" functions
