Thread/Forum Read Marking

Jeremy, IMO 900 seconds can be too short to mark *all* threads as 'read'. It's only 15 minutes and some questions can use up more time to answer (looking up solutions, verifying work-arounds, stuff like that) so if one answers a question like that, the remaining ones are no longer available in a single look and force said user to check timestamps of posts to see if it contains new messages after his last visit. Please at least consider extending this timespan significantly, but not using it may prove more practical.

Whatever you decide, you (and the moderator team) have my respect for keeping LQ in the frontline of Linux relevance

Originally Posted by Dutch Master Jeremy, IMO 900 seconds can be too short to mark *all* threads as 'read'.

As I understand, the 900 seconds limit only applied to the old system, and not the new.

Anyway, I'm very glad about this change, because the unread subscribed threads feature in My LQ actually works now!

Well the "you last visited" thingy at the top says it has been 11 minutes short of 3 hours since I was last in here yet I have 2 complete pages of threads that "have not been updated since your last visit but still contain unread posts." I didn't read them before because I had no interest in them and here we are 3 hours later and they are still showing up.

Originally Posted by jeremy [2] Uses the database to store thread and forum read times. This allows accurate read markers to be kept indefinitely. --jeremy

Question - is it actually "indefinitely"? Or have you set an age threshold as well? Many vB boards have this which leads me to assume it's a built-in capability, and protects the server performance via limiting the size of the unread-posts table.

The default seems to be 30 days - ubuntuforums has it set at 3 days which is much too short for me.


eta: Whatever age limit might be sent, I think this new read-marking method is a good thing.

It is weird, but I always thought that [2] was active here all time I registered, and it looked like it: I could mark forum read in one PC in one place and then go to other PC in other place of town and see threads are marked as read. At least all modern forum SW uses database to store thread read status individually for each user. And now I see one of my forum wit h whole bunch(two pages ~100 threads) of "unread" threads(last post date is up to 12th November) in one of my regularly visited forums. Is it intended to be so(i.e. as part of transition period)?

I have ONE zero reply thread in my usercp
which doesn't go away even after several clickings.
Rest all threads vanish after clicking.

I have a question: I have a huge amount of unread threads on My LQ (they were actually read a long time ago before the new system was in place). Is there a way to mark them all as read without clicking on every single one of them?

Go down to the bottom of the forum view on the main forum screen and click "mark forums read" which appears just below the list of forums.

This will clear all posts as "read".

Hi.

Originally Posted by Dutch Master Jeremy, IMO 900 seconds can be too short to mark *all* threads as 'read'. It's only 15 minutes and some questions can use up more time to answer (looking up solutions, verifying work-arounds, stuff like that) so if one answers a question like that, the remaining ones are no longer available in a single look and force said user to check timestamps of posts to see if it contains new messages after his last visit. Please at least consider extending this timespan significantly, but not using it may prove more practical. Whatever you decide, you (and the moderator team) have my respect for keeping LQ in the frontline of Linux relevance

+1

It's too soon for me to tell if I like this way of the time-out working, but I can tell you that I really disliked the time-out of the previous method. I might walk away for a cup of coffee and when I came back, everything was updated, and I had trouble telling where I should start looking at threads again.

So thanks for the experiment, I'll try to work with it and provide feedback ... cheers, makyo

OK, so how do I mark Zero Reply Threads as read? I don't read 'em all -- unless I know something about the question, I just ignore most of them (particularly ones about distributions that I have no clue about) but they keep showing up in longer and longer lists from, you know, like yesterday, two days ago, stuff like that.

@Anisha Kaul, @tronayne - the issue of auto-bumped zero-reply threads staying as unread is still with us. I think it's a bug in the auto-bump feature but may not be easily fixable.

What I'd expect is: they pop up as unread (even though you've read them) at whatever time the auto-bump feature bumps them (because that's the point of such a feature), but once you read the post again it shows as read until the next auto-bump. This latter bit is broken, but I think we have to live with it for a while.

Originally Posted by k3lt01 Well the "you last visited" thingy at the top says it has been 11 minutes short of 3 hours since I was last in here yet I have 2 complete pages of threads that "have not been updated since your last visit but still contain unread posts." I didn't read them before because I had no interest in them and here we are 3 hours later and they are still showing up.

You'll need to click "Mark Forums Read" moving forward, they will not automatically be marked as read as they were using the old system.

--jeremy

Originally Posted by SecretCode Question - is it actually "indefinitely"? Or have you set an age threshold as well? Many vB boards have this which leads me to assume it's a built-in capability, and protects the server performance via limiting the size of the unread-posts table. The default seems to be 30 days - ubuntuforums has it set at 3 days which is much too short for me. eta: Whatever age limit might be sent, I think this new read-marking method is a good thing.

We currently have it set to two week, but we may adjust that based on member feedback.

--jeremy

Originally Posted by FeyFre And now I see one of my forum wit h whole bunch(two pages ~100 threads) of "unread" threads(last post date is up to 12th November) in one of my regularly visited forums. Is it intended to be so(i.e. as part of transition period)?

Yes, as previously mentioned this is a one time side effect of the change. The database is now used to keep track of threads you've read. Since this is the first time we've used this functionality, it doesn't think you've read any threads so shows you the last two weeks worth of threads.

--jeremy

Originally Posted by Anisha Kaul I have ONE zero reply thread in my usercp which doesn't go away even after several clickings. Rest all threads vanish after clicking.

Is anyone else able to reproduce this?

--jeremy