I've been having a problem lately on the forums. Whenever I go into a forum and read, say the second or third, unread item, all the ones above it disappear. So I have to go back to the first page and open that forum again. Is anyone else having this problem?

Are you going to that Forum by clicking on the FORUM name (left hand column) or by clicking on the listed posting in the 'Last Post' column?

Clicking on the 'Last Post' column with the name of the thread only takes you directly to that thread and not to the list of topics in that forum.

Carol
I have occured the same problem once in a while. Not everytime. I have to do the same thing and go back and reopen to get back to the last item posted. Hal

John,

I used to have this same thing happen quite often when you first did this last upgrade.

I will got to say"Forums About These Forums" click on it and be presented with 7-8 threads some of which I have read and the 3 that I have not read.

I'll click on the first thread and read it and then use my browsers back button and I'll be presented with all threads that I have read.

I then go back out to "Forums About These Forums" and click on click on it and the unread threads return.

I have not had this happen as much lately- once or twice a week or so. It used to be a daily event.It was mentioned on the Forums back a bit.

Dennis

So I'm not going crazy...now you see it, now you don't.
John,
I always go into the forum by clicking on the name. Any idea what's going on?

The same thing happens to me about 3-4 times a week. I just assumed it was my computer.

John

I have had the same problem recently.

Hank

I, too, have been having this same problem occasionally - also thought it was my computer - glad to learn it's not.

Larry

St. Tim -- could this be cookie related?

I will sign onto the "been there" band wagon on this issue. It has not occurred much lately, but it does periodically rear its ugly head. More of a pain in the backside than anything.

If it is cookie related, I would think the cookie problem somehow resides with the Forum software. This is one of the few sights that has standing approval to park cookies on my system, so the door is open to them. I would have to guess that somehow the software has brain fade and either loses its train of thought or somehow reverts to a previous cookie??

Get a Mac... it's never happened to me!

This has happened to me frequently also.
(My habit is to click my Back button to return to the thread listing.)

Hmmm... it may be indirectly cookie related. Without more info its hard to be definitive, but here's idle speculation... and its long.

Assume Dennis' description of how he navigates is typical for showing the 'problem'. I see it too if I follow the navigation he described.

The UBB software needs some way to track which threads have been read by an individual. A couple ways this might happen are
1. keep this information in the user's current session on the server. (a 'session' is a bit of memory where the server keeps track of things related to a specific person, for example what options s/he has chosen, during the time they are considered 'logged-in'.)
2. keep this information in a cookie.

Either method is a way for information to persist from one page to the next. Web pages have no inherent connection to one another so some means external to the page is used to share information across pages. A session or a cookie is a means to persist information from one page to the next.

Still with me?

In order for the forum software's information to get updated based on a user's activities (EG reading a previously unread thread) the information must be sent from the browser to the server. The server will then update the data in the person's session, or it will send an updated cookie. In either case, this require a request be made from the browser to server in order for the info to passed to the server.

Using the Back Button to navigate does not typically cause a server request to be made. Usually the back button takes the previous page from the browser's cache. This is much faster than a round trip to the server, but it only can show the page in the state it was in when it was first visited. It will not reflect changes between the time the user left it and it is drawn from cache. Thus - using the back button doesn't tell the server that a thread was read - w/out this info it can't update either cookie or session. So when one returns to the forum list via the back button, even from the main page if was backed-in-to, the same threads show as unread.

However, based on some experiments, I think the server updates are occuring based on a person logging-in. A simple way to check this is to open a new browser window - not a clone of an existing window (don't do Ctrl-N - open with the desktop icon). The new browser window should show the forums correctly reflecting the latest state of a user's activities including those from the other browser. Each concurrent login would have its own cookie, so the info is probably being kept on the server side.

Bottom line -
a. if you want to the forum software to do its job, don't use the back button to navigate, click links based on where you want to go.
b. each time you want to access the forums, start a new browser.

These things may reduce the problem. Ultimately it sounds like the UBB code needs to do a little better job tracking the current state of each user. The software does do this for some things but not everything. For example, the fact that a person has replyed to a message is always shown on the main page if you use forum navigation and not the back button. The authors may have chosen not to do update everying with each click or each new page because it adds a lot of extra overhead and slows things down.

Or, it could be something totally unrelated. :-)
Honk if you made it this far.

T