I participate in other vbulletin boards (like overclock.net or twoplustwo.net) where the feature that tracks which posts you’ve read works perfectly.
With this board, it’s very often wrong. I’ll click “go to first new post in this thread” and it’ll usually take me to the last post. Sometimes it’ll take me to a post in the middle of the thread which is just random and nowhere near where I actually left off.
Sometimes it seems to treat it as if every time you read a thread, you’ve read every thread. For example, if you click user CP, and then go to one of the new posts on your subscribed threads and then 10 minutes later go to user CP again, it will have lost track of where you are in the other threads, as if you clicked every subscribed thread rather than just one - the “go to first new post” feature will be gone unless someone happened to have posted in that 10 minute span to one of the threads, in which case you’ll go to that post.
Sometimes if I close my browser and open it up and go back, it doesn’t remember the previous session at all - I’ll have “go to first new post” marks that are identical to the ones in the last browser session.
Just in general, the feature that keeps track of what you’ve read up to in various threads doesn’t seem to work very well. I would’ve thought this was a generic flaw in vbulletin, except other boards work perfectly with no errors at all.
I’ll third this. I often wonder if my privacy settings in my browser (Firefox) have anything to do with it; but my history is kept for fourteen days, and cookies till they expire, so I doubt it.
Might be a side-topic, but in the User CP and list of threads, I wish each one had a box and u could then click “mark thread as read,” even if you haven’t, like e-mail. I hate seeing unread posts, but yet I don’t want to read them all the time… .I guess it’s kinda my OCD-ish cross to bear, but obviously some people have the same deal with e-mail and it works fine there.
I don’t think it’s fair to say it’s “very often wrong” because that implies that it’s sometimes right. It’s never right. The only two things I’ve ever seen are it doing as you’ve said, bringing you to the end or to a random place a couple of pages beyond where I left off reading; for the latter, I think it’s actually bringing you to the last post that was in the thread when you read it earlier, regardless of how far into the thread you read before.
Actually, it sometimes is right. Hell, for me, it’s often right, but that’s because of how I read threads.
As near as I can figure out, it generally takes you to the first post made after your last session timed out. Your session gets refreshed whenever you bring up a page in the forums while logged in. So if you pop in to read a single thread at noon, and you come back later that night, the link should take you to any posts in any thread made after noon, regardless of whether that’s the thread you read at noon.
What I do is load up all the threads I’m interested in using tabs. Then I go through and read them without refreshing anything or loading more pages from the forum. For multipage threads, I’ve got to plan ahead and load the extra pages into tabs. Any threads that I want to reply to (such as this one), I try and move to the front of the list so I can reply relatively soon after I’ve loaded up all the threads. It’s a hassle, but it does keep the “go to unread posts” links working, more or less.
All the board does, as far as I know, is keep a timestamp from the last time you were active on the site. If you click “Last read” it just takes you to the first post after that timestamp. Otherwise it would be saving data on every thread for every user, which would slow the site down and balloon the amount of data saved.
For smaller message boards it won’t be as noticeable. For large message boards there will always be some discrepancies.
I don’t think the amount of data saved would be that significant. The examples I gave up thread, twoplustwo.com is significantly bigger/more active than the SDMB (33 on big-boards.com) and overclock.net isn’t far behind, and both boards are faster, less prone to interrupted service, and have perfect per-thread tracking functionality.
I suspect that at some point maybe vbulletin didn’t have the feature working right, and that’s when the SDMB codebase split off from it, and they haven’t gotten around to upgrading that part of it, but that’s just a guess.
I too open up everything in tabs because I hate trying to figure out where I should be and it so often times me out if I go one thread at a time.
I actually visit here less than I do other forums because I don’t always have time to read every new post. I save coming here until I do have time to wade through them. If I could come in 5 minutes here, 10 minutes there throughout the day and only have the threads I actually open change the “first unread post,” I’d come more often. I know if pop in for 10 minutes at 3pm, it’s going to be more of a hassle than I like when I come back at 11pm.