Been having to manually mark forums read lately

For some reason, I've been having to mark forums read lately. Just opening a thread will make the icon grey out within the subtopic, but unless I click "mark forum read" it will still have the icon lit up blue on the main page.

For example if lets say the only new post in the "Gatekeeper" topic is in the vertical construction thread, and I open that, while in the "Gatekeeper" topic all the threads will be "grayed out" afterwords, but on the main topics page, "Gatekeeper" will still be highlighted as having new posts.

Not really a big issue, but definitely some kind of bug so I thought I'd let you know.

I'm using the latest version of Google Chrome if that helps.

Jeff can confirm, but I think the forums have always been that way. I see the same behavior.

This is something I remember being the case since this version of the site launched. It used to be marking the forum read wouldn't redirect you back to the main page, and that was at least changed. I am just used to pushing that to go back to the main page, so I don't even notice it anymore.

Edit:
See this threads for more info.
http://pointbuzz.com/Forums/Thread/22411.aspx

If I remember the reasoning behind this, in order to mark the entire forum read, the code would have to loop through all the threads in said forum to see if they were unread or not. With the size some of the forums can get to with thousands of threads, this would be a processing hog.

The simple solution was to have the user simply mark each forum read once they were done with it. There is also a "Mark All Read" button on the main page that you can use to hit them all at once.

TLDR -> not a bug, it's operating as intended.

Walt is right, that the behavior has always been this way. John is also right, that part of the reason it works this way is that the forum can't loop through all 23k+ topics to see if you've read them all.

Hmmm...in the olden days, the .newsrc file dealt with that problem by only maintaining a list of unread messages...and even that was encoded using some notation to indicate ranges of unread messages.

Of course, .newsrc only applies to messages still on the user's spool, and the reader typically did not access the spool in real time, so trying to do so anything similar with web forums would be just *slightly* 8-) more complicated.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.