The bulletin board software has great features like marking messages you haven't read yet and providing a link to the first new message in a thread.

I find that this works for me for about 20 minutes max before I submit a post or maybe my session times out and then somehow everything gets marked as read and I have no idea what threads are actually new for me.

I have this same problem on at least 3 different computers that I browse from.

Is this to be expected? Could I be doing anything differently?


I often wish I could use a news reader or outlook express to read the messages in this forum... But if it were available as a newsgroup, would it loose something. There seems to be something different about that sort of community. Plus, this way I can get at the message board from 3 different places...

There's a global VBulletin setting that marks all posts as read for you if no activity is detected for a certain period of time. The default is 15 minutes. I just changed it to 60 minutes, so hopefully that will be enough time.

That's great Steve :)

I had the same problem (that and the session expiring too fast, so I have to keep browsing the forum almost constantly).

.... oh, is *that* why everything refuses to mark itself read today?

I don't suppose there's any way to make this a user setting rather than a global one? I read quickly and neurotically check web boards quite frequently (me and my collection of different windows), and now I'm stuck with over half the threads on this forum showing themselves as new, even though I read them hours ago.

It's annoying, because I can't use the "jump to new post" feature anymore.

I'm with papillon - I think 60 minutes is way too long. I don't post often, but I read alot, and I find myself coming back, on occasion, more than once an hour. It doesn't take that long to read every thread.

Actually, I find the buttons absolutely unusable now if I want to come back and refresh the page after I've finished reading.

The "Mark All Forums Read" feature has been working fine for me. Could it be a browser caching problem? What happens if you hit Refresh after marking the forums read? Does it still show the old threads as unread?

If I wait more than an hour, it works fine... but see, I'm addicted to this forum, and I quite often come back in less than that time, so there end up being lots of items that claim they're new when they're not.

And for some reason, when I came back, it didn't mark this thread as having new posts, perhaps because it was still in that time out period when you replied or something.

Do you manually "mark all forums as read" before leaving the forum each time? This is what I normally do. Then if you come back 20 minutes later, you should see only the posts that have been new within the last 20 minutes.

Here, "mark this forum as read" doesn't seem to do anything. The "all messages marked as read" (or something like that) page is displayed, then the forum is reloaded, but the "Go to first unread post" buttons are still here. Even if I reload the page once again.

However, I'm using a "non standard" browser, and the session cookie doesn't work either here; so you might want to hear other people's thought on the subject before spending time to fix this...

Manually marking as read works fine for me - I'd never noticed that option before. Hadn't needed it before. :)

[edit: Well, almost fine. It has a wacky habit of forwarding me to sites that I was looking at hours ago instead of forwarding me back to the forum (after marking things read). But the actual marking works.]

I hadn't seen that option as it's a link and not a nice pretty button. I think it's annoying that I will have to do that.

I must say that I liked 15 minutes better, but I guess that I will get used to press that link before I leave.

Why aren´t you guys making some great games instead of surfing this board for more than 15 minutes at a time? ;)

How about a 30-minute interval then instead of a 60-minute one? Would that be better for most of you?

30 minutes is definitely better for me.

As for the "Mark as Read" option, when I came back, it showed me everything I read the previous time as new posts.

freeman - I'm at my day job... nuff said? :) I can't wait until it's over at the end of August.

If you click Mark Forum As Read will it mark all posts, or only those presented to you when you brought up the thread list? I'm always skiddish of clicking mark-as-read buttons like that for fear of missing posts that came in while I was reading others. In any case, 30 minutes sounds good.

Mark as read will mark all posts as read, even those you might not have seen yet.

elund, I know what you mean. Just get in the habit of clicking refresh before clicking Mark As Read. If something new comes up in the list, read it before marking.

You know what...I'm having problems with the Mark As Read option too. Earlier I could have sworn I marked the forum as read, but when I came back a bunch of old messages were marked as new posts. I assumed my memory was just wrong, so when I finished reading, I was sure to mark them as read. After I did, I refreshed the page and they were all no longer new posts. I thought I was good, but I came back now 30-45 minutes later, clicked refresh on the topic list page, and all the ones that I had marked are now showing up as new posts even though they haven't been updated.

P.S. I just tried it again. Marked everything as read, closed the browser, came back to the site, refreshed the page, and a bunch of old messages are new.

Also, somewhat related, I've been noticing in the last few weeks that I keep getting cached copies of the forums pages in my browser. I keep having to click refresh to see the updated page each time. I never used to have a problem, but it simultaneously started happening on 2 different machines. Nothing changed on either machine. It seems as if maybe the forum isn't sending expires headers back to the browser to tell the browser not to cache the page.

Edit: OK, I just did some more checking, and the forum pages are sending back the following header for each page:

Cache-Control: max-age=1800

This tells the browser to cache the page for 1800 seconds (30 minutes). Is there any way to eliminate this?

Ok, I found and enabled an option in the VBulletin control panel to send "No-cache" headers, and I just verified that they're being sent now. Please let me know if this does the trick. I also reduced the cookie timeout to 30 minutes instead of 60.

I can't reproduce any of these symptoms here, so maybe it only happens with certain browsers or ISPs. If anyone still has this problem, please post which browser and ISP you're using. Maybe we'll find a commonality there....

OK, the caching problem is fixed. Thanks, it's so much better (wish I had brought it up sooner :) ).

With regard to the Mark As Read bug, it still happens. Click Mark As Read and it does its job, close the browser, reopen, go to the topic list page, and everything shows as new. I have IE 6.0.2800.1106, and I also get the same problem with Mozilla 1.2.1
and it happens on 2 different computer with different ISPs.