Thread

Howdy. Happy new year!

Regarding the “new” and “old” indicators in front of forum thread titles, I’ve been trying to figure out how that’s defined and controlled. It’s always baffled me—for instance, I come to the EE forum and all sorts of things I’ve never looked at show as “old” (or “read” or whatever). It’s causing real problems for my forum members. Since the forum module doesn’t track what’s been read in any more meaningful way, anyone who doesn’t want to deal with email notifications tries to rely on those little indicators, but there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to when they indicate that there’s something unread in a thread. In other words, people regularly complain that the indicator didn’t indicate there were new posts when in fact there were.

Is there an explanation of this functionality somewhere? Is it controllable at all on my end? Any way to make sure the threads with unread posts actually display as such?

Mod Edit: Moved to the Technical Support forum.

Anyone?

I really do need an answer to this question. The aids to usability with the forum module are problematically few—I need to at least make sure this one is working for people.

Karen,

I’m sorry you had to wait on this.

Old threads are those that have not been posted to since your last visit, or those that you have read.  A ‘visit’ ends when you leave the site for more than 2 hours.

So if you leave one thread unread, go to sleep, and come back the next day - that thread will be marked as read.  Any that were posted to after you left will show as new (until you read them).

Does that make sense?

Hi, Pascal. This part makes sense (at least conceptually):

Old threads are those that have not been posted to since your last visit, or those that you have read.

This part, not so much:

So if you leave one thread unread, go to sleep, and come back the next day - that thread will be marked as read.

If it’s only tracking what you’ve read during a single visit, rather than overall, that’s utterly useless. Why is something you haven’t read marked as read? Am I misunderstanding what you’re saying?

But it’s also not what happens, in my experience. There are threads in my forum I haven’t read in months and they are (correctly) indicated right now as having something unread in them. And obviously I come and go from my own forum many times a day, but often with 2-hour intervals between visits.

So if you leave one thread unread, go to sleep, and come back the next day - that thread will be marked as read.

That is of course assuming that nothing new has been posted into this thread since you left, which may also explain the behavior you’re seeing. If they are active threads they will certainly show as having unread content.  Sorry if that wasn’t clear.

There are reasons for doing it this way.  Keeping track of the status indefinitely means storing either the read or unread threads for every single user.  That may work well for a small forum, but on an installation like ours with over 65000 users and more than 85000 threads it simply is not viable.

There’s also a question of relevance which is a point that can surely be argued, but I personally spend very little time on page 2 of any of our subforums and no time at all on any older pages.

~Pascal

I want to make sure I’m understanding what you’re saying, because I find it hard to believe so maybe it’s a misunderstanding on my part.

You’re saying that if someone visits my forum, doesn’t have time to read everything that’s new, so they read some things and leave some for later, the system will assume they’re not interested in the things they didn’t read on that visit and mark them as read?

You’re saying that if someone visits my forum, doesn’t have time to read everything that’s new, so they read some things and leave some for later, the system will assume they’re not interested in the things they didn’t read on that visit and mark them as read?

They would be no longer considered “New”, that is correct.

So it’s another thing that’s really of no help at all to the people who are trying to keep up with my forum. That’s extremely discouraging.

Which leaves me with: Is there anything I can do to make it behave otherwise? I.e., so it actually points to the stuff people haven’t read until they either read it or deliberately mark it as read?

I am afraid what you are seeing is expected, standard behavior. As there seem to be no remaining Tech Support issues, I am going to mark this thread as “Resolved”. Please do feel free to make a feature request to change these aspects of the forum module.

Greetings, Karen,

First, you sent us some feedback privately and I would like to thank you for that feedback.

In relation to your last question about modifying this behavior, while there are extension hooks in the forum, this may take a significant hack in order to realize.  That is not something that we’d be able to support.  I do understand where you are coming from in that the behavior is not what your forum users expect.  I strongly encourage you to post a feature request about changing this behavior.

If you do want to explore the possibilities of an extension, then you can review our Development Documentation. 

Do you have any remaining questions at this point?

Lisa, thanks for reopening the thread and answering the question. If there’s no good way to do it, I will put in a feature request as you suggest.

Glad Lisa was able to help. Don’t hesitate to post again as needed.