For those who have been on this BBS a long time, you probably know about the unmarked threads bug. It's plagued this BBS ever since its inception, and it seems to be a bug in the BBS software itself (i.e., our BBS isn't the only one that seems to have the problem).

The bug is as follows: Sometimes, after you are done reading a thread, it still appears marked as though it has new posts in it. Even though there are no new posts in that thread.

Furthermore, this "marked new" flag on the thread only counts when you are viewing the list of posts in a forum. It's not present when you are at the main BBS index. So, for instance, you might enter a forum which shows no new messages from the main screen, yet has threads marked as new once you're inside the forum (and I'm not talking about bad timing).

Also, this problem seems to come and go. A given person could experience the problem for a week and then it will go away, only to go bite another user.

I think I stumbled across a work-around for this bug. I'm not sure, so if anyone else is experiencing the bug and wants to test this for me, let me know.

The work around, I suspect, might be: Click on the "Logout" link at the top of the screen, then log back into the BBS again. When I do this, the bug seems to go away. Eventually, the bug comes back, but at least this seems to be a temporary cure for me.

Does anyone see the same behavior?

I never logout so I do know.

I will say however, that this bug has been hitting me far less frequently in recent versions of the bbs software. I can now actually use IE at home to read the bbs, without being hit by the bug once a day (I had that very, very strange problem where IE at work would rarely hit the bug, IE at home would regularly hit it and Mozilla would hit it rarely as well). The bug now seems to hit all of my different browsers in different places about equally...

FWIW I haven't seen the unmarked threads problem in along time, but then again, there are so many new posts every time I check the BBS that I might not notice. It was much more noticable when I was reading dozens of threads in a sitting instead of hundreds.

Sometimes, after you are done reading a thread, it still appears marked as though it has new posts in it.

I see this bug so rarely (maybe once a month) that it doesn't bother me.

But what about the much nastier bug (or did we decide it was a "feature") where if you open a forum and then close it, all of the posts (whether read or unread) are flagged as read?

That's the one I would like to see exterminated.

tanstaafl.

As far as I'm concerned that is a feature. It would make sense if there was a button to trigger this feature, rather than it happening automatically, or perhaps a user preference to decide whether it was automatic or not.

You definitely do need to be able to do "mark all posts read", especially with the current volume of messages.

I just got hit by the bug for the first time for a while. Tony's suggestion of logging out and then back in looks like it might be valid (though of course the board that you were in gets marked read).

Tony's suggestion of logging out and then back in looks like it might be valid (though of course the board that you were in gets marked read).

Right, I would only do the bugfix immediately after finishing up with a forum.

Could this be because they are possiblly logged in on two different PC's. I think this might have happened to me, I left my pc logged in at work and went home and logged in... Sound like a possibility?

I go back and forth between two PCs all the time, and the bug only hits me occasionally.

Here is one last stupid question...

Under : Tools: Internet Options: General : Temporary Internet Files: Settings : Check for newer versions of the page :

Is "Every visit to the page" selected ???

The Explorer cache isn't part of the problem here. Clearing the browser cache and/or reloading the page doesn't solve the problem. We've been through this before.

One thing that has helped in the past temporarily is clearing the cookies. Theoretically, this should be the same thing as hitting the "logout" link. I'm wondering, though, if the "logout" link does some more stuff on the server side that isn't done if you just locally clear your cookies. I'm thinking that's the difference.

Hm, I think that this bug is especially annoying *because* of high traffic volume: I can rarely find enough time to read (or skim through) the whole forum in one gulp. But I agree, some way of ignoring certain threads (or marking them read) would come handy.