Yeah, I can go to “New Posts” menu, and that’s what I usually do. But then I go to “Straight Dope Message Board” and see posts alongside the Forums that weren’t in “New Posts,” and opening up the individual forums I see posts that are unfamiliar as well.
Opening up each forum and looking at all the recent posts seems a bit time-consuming, and just “New Posts” takes a lot of time to peruse already.
Is there a better way?
First, let me say that it’s possible that the New Posts doesn’t actually log all the new posts, but I doubt it.
My guess is that two things are happening here.
One is that there is a lag time (or was, before the latest upgrade) between a post and the indexing of it. Modern database systems are full of queues, putting posting ahead of processing of indices- everything seems exactly simultaneous, but it really isn’t, and that leads to temporarily mismatched information.
Perhaps with the lastest upgrade the lag time will be less and the matching better.
Second, there is always activity that makes the answers obsolete. At most times there is over 1 post per view- that is, if you look at a forum list to see what’s new and then hit Refresh, it will usually be different.
If someone wants to find out how out of sync things are, when you go to a new page do it by opening a new window (on the right-click menu, or via Ctrl-N). Then they can look back at the time stamps to see if the changes are really within the last minute or not.
However, IMHO, it would be simpler to take the philosophical approach that it doesn’t matter.
The logic here is that if the New Posts menu is a bit “dated” that it will only be a minute or two behind. Thus you get the same information as if you had started surfing a minute or two earlier. And since you didn’t schedule your start of surfing to the minute, it’s really not all that different.
I’ve complained about this before and not gotten any answers. If you only stick to a couple fora, then you can easily hit “new posts” to see what’s in everything and then head off to GQ or GD to see specifically what you might have missed. If you regularly check more fora, then you’d be just as well off checking everything individually. Fortunately, they’ve limited the fora to 4 pages each (although I haven’t checked to see if it’s the default or can be changed…), so there’s not as much to go through as there used to be. Of course, if you don’t check every couple of days, you possibly miss something.
Any time you ask for a list of something on this board, you’re asking for a snapshot of a moment in time, more or less.
Since new posts and threads are constantly being added to the board, it’s only a fleeting moment at best.
To see a more up to date list from your last “snapshot,” you’ll have to refresh the page.
There will always be a lag of some bit of time; it can’t be helped.
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
Thanks, all. That’s what I was afraid of.
SnakeS