Forum Setting Request

[Rick Christopherson]

Just wondering if I am alone in noticing this.

The current setting for determining whether a thread/forum is considered read or unread is based on the time-out setting of the forum (somewhere between 30 and 45 minutes). When this timeout has been reached, the entire forum gets marked as read. That may not sound like a big deal, except it also removes some of the other features available for opening an unread thread, such as jumping to the newest post.

So for example, if you just started to visit the forum, but something came up and you had to answer an email or browse to another website, when you come back, the entire forum (and all subforums) will be marked as being read, and all unread thread features disabled.

This is controlled by a simple setting in the AdminCP under Settings/General/Thread/Forum Read Marking Type. Right now it is set to "Inactivity", but setting this to "Database (no automatic....)" will correct this without taking a noticeable hit on CPU or database process.

MarkRead1.jpg

MarkRead2.jpg

To minimize any database hit, you could set the Database Read Marking Limit to 1 day or 2 days. When this time period expires, all threads are considered read regardless whether the visitor has been to the forum or not.

MarkRead3.jpg

[Matt Meiser]

To minimize any database hit, you could set the Database Read Marking Limit to 1 day or 2 days. When this time period expires, all threads are considered read regardless whether the visitor has been to the forum or not.

Yes I've noticed it. But if the setting above is the tradeoff, thats a bad tradeoff.

[Rick Christopherson]

Yes I've noticed it. But if the setting above is the tradeoff, thats a bad tradeoff.

I think I misspoke on that. I don't believe it gets cleared if you haven't visited. It gets cleared based on your last visit.

[Keith Outten]

This subject is way over my knowledge level of the software and the impact it may have on our server. I will ask Aaron Koehl to look into this and report back.
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[Dan Hintz]

Yeah, I read through every post (well, almost every), so if I'm away for more than a day, I can come back to 8-10+ pages worth of threads to look through. I can easily time out before reading half of those.

When I travel and disappear for a week or two... whew, it can take me half of a day to get caught up :-/

[Rick Christopherson]

This subject is way over my knowledge level of the software and the impact it may have on our server. I will ask Aaron Koehl to look into this and report back.
.

It shouldn't have any noticeable effect on your server. Most vBulletin forums are running this way ever since the feature was added. I periodically chat with the Admin at the Mike Holt Electrical forum (a very large forum) about mods and settings. They switched the setting shortly after discovering it with no noticeable side effect.

[Bill Cunningham]

I'd like to see the spellchecker turned on in the forum...