UnRead Thread Marking

[Matt]

Some of you may have experienced some inconsistent behavior regarding which threads show up in bold as not having yet been read and which ones show as already having been read. Furthermore, when you log in to the forum from a different computer, the "read threads" have not been carrying over correctly.

vBulletin allows a few different ways to handle marking of unread threads and by default an option that has some of the flaws above (but is not processor intensive) is selected. This default option stores your read threads in a cookie on your local computer, which obviously is not portable when you go to a different computer and is also subject to space limitations.

We have switched the forum over to the most accurate method of marking read threads, one which stores the information about the posts and threads you have read in the database, so the above issues are avoided. Two key things you will notice in this transition:

1) To start with, all threads will show as unread since the database doesn't know at the beginning who has read what. This will make things awkward for the first few times you visit the forum starting this evening.

2) If 10 days go by and a thread does not receive any new posts, it will convert to being a "read" thread for you, even if you never opened it. This will allow you to differentiate between old threads you've passed on reading and ones with new posts that may be of more interest. It also helps the database to store a much smaller amount of data.

As always, your constructive feedback on any functional issue is appreciated.