Why does the board sometimes think I've re-logged in when I change forums?

Arrrrgh, this is so frustrating! It doesn’t happen every time but it’s been happening more frequently lately. When I come to the Dope, I’ll visit the first forum on my hitlist, GQ. When I get to the bottom of the first page, I’ll use the Forum Jump to go to Cafe Society. For whatever reason, sometimes when I do that the board will act as if I’ve just re-logged in, and every thread will show as “No New Posts”, with the blue closed envelope. Then I’m screwed for the other forums I visit because it affects those too, of course.

Any idea why this happens and any way to avoid it?

It isn’t related to logging in. I stay logged in all the time, and it happens to me, too.

It’s just the lame way vBulletin implements that feature. It uses your “last visited” date and time, which is stored in a cookie, and which naturally gets reset some minutes after you start browsing the board again.

I agree, it is a pain. And there have been many complaints about it, but vBulletin hasn’t changed the feature. My own naïve idea is that they could alleviate the problem by having a separate “last visited” cookie for every forum. But since they haven’t even done that, there must be more to it.