Problem with "New Posts"

[CJ]

Just to jump in here. I do realize there is an issue with the New Posts. I'm still trying to understand what vBulletin is doing to determine new posts. It seems to use what it calls your last visit. This is the session before your current one (that's you create when you log on). It then compares post times to that date/time. Anything newer is considered new.

Now, once you've been away for 15 minutes, it resets your last visit to the session that just expired, thereby resetting new posts.

So, the ideas are these:

1) Increase the logout time. Problem is that this also affects who's online.
2) Hack Active Topics to show unread/subscribed threads. Might work, but unread would still lose posts after 15 minutes.
3) Figure out another way to handle the last visit date. I'll have to look at the old vb2 code and see what it did for this...Can any of you explain how it used to work with vb2?

Thanks,
CJ

Followup: A decent explanation from the vBulletin folks:

The read marking system has two levels to it. One uses your forum session, the other uses your current browser session.

All new posts since your last forum session remain unread until your forum session expires, you logout, or you click the "Mark Forums Read" link. The session timeout setting is 15 minutes by default.

During your forum session, unread posts get marked as read within your browser window as you view them. This is all client-side... the posts are still unread on the vBulletin-side. If you open a new browser window before your session times out then the unread posts since your last forum session will be unread again.

I'm going to change the cookie timeout to 20 minutes and see if that helps any.

CJ

[PCBruiser]

Well, the old v2 handled it quite differently, as you know. If you were on the new posts "page" simply refreshing the page in your browser would refresh all the threads, show new threads and indicated which threads you had read the most recent posts on. That way, if you use FireFox for example, you could set it to automatically refresh every minute, say, and you would stay on line, all the threads would update, and you could be off doing something else for as long as you wanted to. Thus, once you were logged in, you would stay logged in, and everything was kept current, nothing would be lost due to a time out. In effect, you only needed to hit new threads once - when you logged in, thereafter refresh would take care of keeping everything up to date.

Edit: I guess the key to this is that v2 may have used your user ID to handle management of new threads rather than a particular search/session ID.

[CJ]

PCBruiser - Got it - thank you - it's been a while since I looked at this - other things on my mind

I have an idea how we can fix this. I'm going to try to hack the new posts search to not cache the search. That way, it would refresh whenever you hit refresh, just like vb2.

CJ

[Bofinn]

I'm keeping my fingers crossed! Thx CJ...

[Cogar]

Originally Posted by PCBruiser

Well, the old v2 handled it quite differently, as you know. If you were on the new posts "page" simply refreshing the page in your browser would refresh all the threads, show new threads and indicated which threads you had read the most recent posts on. That way, if you use FireFox for example, you could set it to automatically refresh every minute, say, and you would stay on line, all the threads would update, and you could be off doing something else for as long as you wanted to. Thus, once you were logged in, you would stay logged in, and everything was kept current, nothing would be lost due to a time out. In effect, you only needed to hit new threads once - when you logged in, thereafter refresh would take care of keeping everything up to date.

Edit: I guess the key to this is that v2 may have used your user ID to handle management of new threads rather than a particular search/session ID.

The "new posts" feature used to be even more forgiving than that (no refresh necessary). You could bookmark a new posts search and even if you were interrupted for days, it would remain a valid search. I liked that because I would not miss any posts. It was just a matter of going back to the bookmark--even in a different session on a different day--and going through the ever-growing list.

PS: Thank you for looking into this, CJ. I know that you must be very busy with a new baby added to your already hectic life.

[Bofinn]

I would bookmark as well. Came in handy for when I'd lose my connect to the zone, or the site went down...

[CJ]

OK, I've done the best I can. When you do new posts, the url will stay:

http://www.abxzone.com/forums/search.php?do=getnew

Therefore, you can hit refresh and get the latest posts and stay logged in. However, if you go to the next page, it will not refresh. The good news is that when you go to the next page, it will use the latest list, and you can stay with that search id.

See if that takes care of things.

CJ

[PCBruiser]

Thanks, CJ, your continuing efforts are much appreciated.

[PCBruiser]

CJ, that works perfectly! Just like the old v2 actually. Thanks so much for solving this problem so well.

[Bofinn]

Thank You CJ!

[FB]

HOw about this, type out your really long posts in Word, then copy them to here. that is what i always do, then you don't have to worry about loosing the info.