On this board, after so much time (not sure how long but a couple-three hours or so) all the threads get automatically marked as having been read. Is there a way to disable this behavior?
I’m a member on another board which has the same software and this doesn’t happen at all. Not even after days or weeks.
So is this something I can change in my UserCP or is it set for everyone by the PTB? If the latter, can we persuade the PTB to change this?
Afraid not.
I don’t see this behavior. I can skip a day, come back, and have a large list of unread threads.
You’ll only see threads that have been updated since the timestamp of your last visit. Threads you didn’t read but haven’t been updated since you left don’t show up as unread.
It’s either a config setting or an extension to the software. I run a site that behaves the same as SDMB and it appears to be the default behavior.
For me, this only happens when I’m logged in. That is, if I’m browsing when not logged in, threads only show read when I’ve actually opened them (in a given browser session – if I close and reopen the browser, everything shows up unread again). However, when I’m logged in, if I come here and look at a few threads, and then come back, every thread that hasn’t been updated shows up as read, even if I didn’t open that thread.
Posts are listed as read/unread based on the “Last Visited” timer you can see in the upper right. Posts made before that time are marked as read, ones after that are new.
If you do not explicitly log out, the board will mark you as logged out after a certain amount of inactivity (I think it’s set to an hour?). This log out function sets that last visited timer to that time.
There have been issues with some people having the last visited timer suddenly change to the current time, marking everything as read, in the middle of a session. This happens most often when the board hardware is having some sort of problem, but a few people are having it happen even when the board seems to be OK, for reasons that nobody has figured out yet.
half an hour, I do believe.
I’ve had this happen on other boards running vBulletin, so I assume it’s a bug in their software that’s triggered under certain conditions and not directly related to SDMB servers.