I tried to search for this, but couldn’t find it. I’m new to the board and am having trouble keeping up with the new posts. As I leave one board and go to the next, and then back again, stuff I’ve already looked at is still showing as unread. Did that make any sense at all?
Anyway, question:
What’s the best strategy for keeping up with all the boards?
It does indeed, and the explanation is fairly simple. Your web browser is caching the pages you view so your browsing is faster. When you load a page, then go to another, then back tot he first, it will appear the same as when you first loaded it (and load nearly instantly).
The easiest way to solve it is to hit the “Reload” or “Refresh” button on your browser, and the page will update form the SDMB server, showing you the most up-to-date information on where you’ve been.
You can also disable the caching function, but it’s a pain and will slow down your non-SD browsing something fierce.
Keeping up with all of the boards? Impossible. Find a few that you like, and just keep up with those. As to the read/unread posts, the software isn’t too smart about it anyways… I usually just look at the date for the last post, start at the oldest one since I last read, and work my way up the list.
It’s true that the amount of messages posted to the SDMB is phenomenal (at least in the view of this small-town boy.) If one wanted to read every post on every forum, it could easily take many hours per day.
What I personally do: I skim through the subject lines of each forum, and decide which ones are worth reading. If you are an infrequent visitor (by that I mean that you don’t come here at least once every two or three days), then you will notice that many posts, in the more frequented fora, will fall off the first page after one or two days.
One method you can use is keep a small document with the URLs of threads that you wish to follow. This saves time in hunting them down. (Or you can use the bookmarks in your browser, but then you have to remember to keep cleaning up your bookmarks.)