I didn’t entitle this “What’s Up with the Default Thread View?” because I don’t know if there’s anything Up, or not.
I’ve got my Control Panel set to show the forum default number of threads. Sometimes, when I browse the Straight Dope, the forums show threads “from last 2 days.” Sometimes, the forums show threads “from last day.” Lately, all forums have been set on either one time or another, although I thought I’ve seen the 1 day/2 days defaults intermixed. For on brief shining moment a couple weeks ago, the defaults were set differently in each forum, with Cecil’s Columns and Staff Reports set at 10 days, GQ at 2, and MPSIMS at 1, and the others I don’t remember. Now all forums are the same.
Whoa, weird. Ten minutes ago, GQ was set to 2 days. Right now, I’m seeing one day.
So what’s going on? Are you changing defaults through the day? Is the default different if I haven’t visited the forum in a while? Or is is the “problem” on my end? What should I be seeing? What does everyone else see? What do unregistered people see?
Crazy! The view was one day. I just logged out, and then all the forums were set at ten days. Log back in, and it’s two days. What the heck?
Is this a possible hamster-strainer? If lurkers are all sending ten-day forum requests, instead of one or two, that’s gotta put a little extra drag on the server. Unless it’s just me.
zut - I’ll try to investigate this week-end if time permits. In the meantime, all I can say is that at times of high activity the SDMB server has been known to act erratically.
OK, Arnold, I sort of figured out what is happening, but not sure why.
When I first log on, I see the “correct” default in the first forum I visit. In other words, if I go from the Front Page straight to CCC, I get a ten-day default. If I go to ATMB, I get a two-day default. If I go to MPSIMS, I get a one-day default.
If I then jump from forum to forum from the forum page (not from a thread), I keep the same default time. In other words, if I go Front Page -> CCC -> ATMB -> MPSIMS, then I see all forums with a ten-day default. If I go Front Page -> MPSIMS -> CCC -> ATMB, all forums have a one-day default.
If I jump from a thread to a forum (not with the back browser button, but with the pull-down forum menu), then I see the “correct” default time for the new forum.
So it appears that the problem is that “default thread view” doesn’t get redefined if I jump from one forum page to another.
Since my style of reading the SDMB is to go to a forum, read a thread, hit “back”, read another thread, hit “back”, decide there are no more interesting threads in that forum, change forums, etc, then I wind up stuck with the same default all the time. Someone who jumps from an individual thread to another forum would never see this problem (such as it is).
zut - What you said has proven true for me also. Good detective work! It looks like a vBulletin bug. I.e. the “from” time that is the forum default is used for displaying the list of threads in a forum, except when I am currently on the forum thread list display for ForumX and I jump to ForumY using the Forum Jump drop-down; in that case the default for ForumX will be used to display the threads in ForumY.
I will check with vBulletin to see if this is a known bug.