Forum improvement: New posts indicators

Long time users of the forum know that when you are logged in and click the "mark forum read" button, none of the topics show a brighter "new posts" indicator. With the build I just deployed, there is now a feature where viewing a topic will mark that specific topic as "not new" when you go back to the list of topics. This works in all topic lists: forums, search, user posts, recent, favorites and subscriptions.

If you weren't already aware of it, clicking the new posts icon itself from a topic list will bounce you to the newest post in that topic, so you don't need to click the title and then the "jump to newest post link."

Keep in mind that if you go back to the forum list and have not clicked the "mark forum read" or "mark all forums read" buttons, the forums will still have a new post indicator. That's because it wouldn't be cost efficient to check and see for every forum if potentially hundreds or thousands of topics are all viewed.

This forum build has been up for a couple of hours and I haven't seen any errors in the error log, but if you see any weirdness, let me know.

Awesome. I've hoped for this feature for quite a long time. Thanks Jeff. :)

Two things, one more interesting than the other:

1. Server Error - While in the General forum, I clicked on the title of the "Forum improvement" thread, which naturally took me to the first post in that thread. I had meant to click the new post icon, so I backed up and clicked said icon, which then gave me an error. After a few back and forward's, the icon is now marked as read, and I no longer get the error message.
2. Google ads - The in-thread Google ads are appearing, when they should not be.

I know what those problems are. I'll look into them later.

I also have google ads, and should not.

I was pleasantly surprised yesterday when I noticed that a post I had read marked itself as read. I've seen no issues yet.

Both fixes should be in now.

I am noticing an issue where the forum isn't being marked as "read" even though I've read through all the "unread" threads in that forum. It does mark itself as "read" when I hit the button.

The threads are marking themselves just fine.

Just press the button mr-I'm-too-lazy-to-click-a-button.

Keep in mind that if you go back to the forum list and have not clicked the "mark forum read" or "mark all forums read" buttons, the forums will still have a new post indicator. That's because it wouldn't be cost efficient to check and see for every forum if potentially hundreds or thousands of topics are all viewed.

I guess I need to work on reading comprehension.

It was working that way before though. As in before the fixes of 25 minutes ago.

I think Jeff was referring to Brandon's two issues being fixed, John.

But in fixing that it is seemingly causing this issue where the forums don't get marked. I thought they were getting marked on their own BEFORE he made this fix. However, I may just be retarded (more likely) and had actually clicked the button before without remembering I did.
Either way, no big deal.

I see what you mean now. Maybe I was retarded before and couldn't comprehend what you were talking about to begin with (most likely). :)

I have always had to mark the forum read even after the threads had been marked as such.

Me too. Which is not a problem.

It's not a problem to me. I thought (again, bad idea) that when Jeff made the changes to auto-mark thread's as read that it was auto-marking the forums. Apparently it did not, and my "noticing" of a bug was just it being a Monday.

The forums never marked themselves read. To scan that many records every time you looked at the list of forums would be a very expensive operation, and the plumbing to do it in another way wouldn't be worth the time invested. I personally don't read every topic, and most people don't, so it still makes sense to manually mark an entire forum read.

I'm sure John reads every thread! :)