Forums marking themselves as Read

[alison]

I don't know whether I'm the only one suffering from this, but I thought I'd post and find out.  Every now and then, I find that forums where I still have unread threads are suddenly marked as Read, and this appears to be irreversible, more's the pity.  Now, as far as I know, there are only two ways in which a user can mark a whole forum as read: i) towards the top of the forum itself, on the right, clicking on "Mark this forum as read", and ii) on the front page listing all the forums, by clicking on the "speech bubble(?)" icon to the left of the forum name.  I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be doing i) without noticing what I'm clicking on, and although it's possible, I suppose, that I might confuse the speech bubble with the dot to the left of individual thread titles, I don't think I'm doing that, either.  Is anyone else finding this?

 

It used to happen only with the Links forum, which was really irritating, because I frequently don't get around to reading weekend links until some time later.  Then I'd find I could no longer see which links I hadn't read, so was unable to catch up.  It now seems to be spreading beyond Links to other forums as well, though.  I know that on one occasion I accessed the week's Links thread on my Chromebook, then when I exited I found the whole forum had been marked Read, but I don't necessarily think it's a problem limited to Chrome: I think it's happened with IE8 as well.  It may be partly down to user error, of course, but I don't think it always is.

[John Mallinson]

A poltergeist?

 

Haven't heard of this before or experienced it myself. Anyone else?

[alison]

I don't believe it: *this* one's doing it now!  John, I only realised you'd replied because I could see your posting highlighted as the most recent one on the "front page".  The entire Problems forum was greyed out for me.

[alison]

I'm now starting to formulate a very tentative hypothesis that it may have something to do with my having the forum open on two different computers at once, and maybe being active on both of them.  I had several weeks' worth of links showing as unread, have posted on the Chromebook and accessed links on the PC, and suddenly all the weekly links threads are greyed out

[alison]

This has now happened to me for the first time on the Opera and Music sub-forum.  I only have the one computer working today, so my above hypothesis can't be the whole truth.

[bridiem]

This has now happened to me for the first time on the Opera and Music sub-forum.  I only have the one computer working today, so my above hypothesis can't be the whole truth.

 

Probably a silly question, but are you definitely signed in to the Forum when this happens? When I access the Forum without signing in (e.g. if I click on a link in an email rather than going to my Forum shortcut) all the threads are greyed out because it doesn't recognise me as a member. Then when I sign in the unread ones are highlighted.

[alison]

Oh yes, I'm always signed in (you can barely do anything without being signed in).

 

Oddly enough, it happened again the other day (Links forum, as usual) when my browser crashed or summat, which I think meant rebooting the computer.  As soon as I got back online, the Links forum was all greyed out.  The others were as they always have been ...