Thinkpads Forum

When I surf to http://forum.thinkpads.com/ I get the colourful icon notifying me of unread posts on several of the foras.

And I click one of them - and all the posts have the grey "already read" icon. And if go back and select another fora I get the same thing.

I have tried to log out, clear cookies and login again - but it does not help. I've also tried another browser where I never have logged in here before and get the same problem there.

And - I have seen this behaviour on another board! Which also uses phpBB.

Pretty weird - and it started a few weeks ago.

Any clues to how I can get my unread posts listed properly?

I have not noticed any recent changes in the way that the forum operates when it comes to keeping track of "new" posts. phpBB appears to automatically note when you have last logged in (and out) and does not place this in any browser cookie; at least none that I could find before.

At any time, if you explicitly or implicitly sign out (clicking the "Log out" link or changing your IP address), this will reset your "last visit" time and therefore what it will think are your "new" posts in the future. There's been more than one occasion when I've just signed on, seen dozens of new posts and then click the "Log out" link by accident, losing all of those "new" posts .

My technique is to click on the "View posts since last visit" link on the main forum index page, scroll back through as many pages as it takes to get to the end, and then launch separate browser tabs off of each thread I want to read, keeping the main listing intact and moving forward in time until I get to the top of the list. Then, even if my DSL connection locks up, I'll at least have a listing of those threads.

Of course I check in here many times during the day. If you don't visit all that often, then this may not work for you. And it certainly doesn't explain why you seem to be losing new posts right away.

Your internet provider might be using NAT (Network Address Translation) balance-loaded over more than one IP. Which means that basically each click on link might come from different IP address, and the board will log you in again once it sees the new one. Resulting in lost time of last visit...
You can check perhaps by reloading this page a few times.

Since I am frequently using my cellular modem for forum access, I have noticed the following: anytime my modem loses its connection and then it gets reestablished, all the forum posts are marked as read. I am still logged in when this happens.

This does not happen with some other non-phpBB boards I visit. I notice that the Lithium board that AT&T Wireless uses always remembers which posts I have read. Evidently my browsing information is stored on AT&T's side. One downside though is that nearly everytime I come back to the AT&T Wireless forum, I have to log in again. Sometimes I get logged out while I am browsing the AT&T Wireless forum.

Zender wrote:Your internet provider might be using NAT (Network Address Translation) balance-loaded over more than one IP

Dead on! Thank you!

And I guess those other foras i frequent use cookies to keep track of me so they do not care about the load-balancing.