Well, don't take this as an insult but your replies sound like one. Boiled down to the basic essence it goes like this:

"The new system is worse because <legitimate complaints>."

"No, it isn't. Now you can do <such and such>."

"But I don't want to do <such and such>. If I do <what I used to do> it takes fewer keystrokes and goes faster."

"But now you can do <such and such>. It's so much better."

"No, the new system is worse because <legitimate complaints>."

"But now you can do <such and such>."

Boiled down even further it goes:
"Doctor, this hurts."
"No, it doesn't."

In this case it is about marking unread threads as read. It no longer do so. But at least some of us users wanted it to. We liked it! Now to de-clutter the screen for the next time I log in I have mark them all manually. And having a right-click button is nearly valueless because I could do the same thing by just opening them individually anyway.

It is a step toward being less convenient. If it wasn't you wouldn't be reading this.

(I'm hoping the Sysops here will read this.)

With the new system you know which posts you have read or marked as read if you don't want to read them.

With the old system you never knew. If you spent too long reading or replying to a post, answered the phone, went for a cup of coffee etc. it would mark every thing as read. If read marks don't mean anything why have then to start with.

Let me explain this again but with a different spin.

When threads, or at least most of them, get old enough you, or at least I, just don't want to see them. Items in For Sale are likely not still available after a few days. Most conversations stop being active after a week or two, sometimes after a few days, and any post after that becomes a monologue, not a dialogue or polylogue. A user can see at a glance which threads are active because the titles of active threads show up in Bold.

In the previous system threads marked themselves as inactive, which is exactly what at least this user wants. With the new system everything unread still shows up in Bold so all the threads I really didn't care about before are screaming READ ME TOO! YOU FORGOT TO READ ME! Maybe I didn't read them the last time I logged in because I wasn't interested or didn't have time. If I didn't have time but do now, I can still open them, seeing at a glance they they are old. If I wasn't interested then I'm still not interested. But now I can make them go away and stop screaming only by marking them, which requires active moves.

This is the modern world, I guess. Everything screams for attention until you tell it to go away. And if another posting happens after you tell it to stop it will start screaming all over again until told to stop again.

Notice I mainly replied (in quotes) to individuals and not rambling to the same person. Some people reply to this thread without reading its content first. Just trying to educate about how it works now and to give it a chance. Something I guess is lost with some.

This is the only forum I visit that used to works like this. I gave its chance. Gave it several weeks before mentioning about the weird way this forum work here (see my other thread).

Another forum I visit almost daily that used the same software as this one is the Garmin forum. It worked just like this one works now. I used past tense because two days ago day switched software (without announcement or warning) so it's completely different (and all threads are now all shown as unread :p). Do I like it? It's too new for me to make a judgment on it. I was accustom to the old one but now I'll just need to accommodate to the new software. Btw, the marking of thread reads didn't change there. It's like here now.

Fair enough but for one thing. I don't really care about which messages are unread. I care about which ones are new. The usage pattern is this: I don't have time to read everything. But I make it a point to read all the stuff I'm interested in every time I log in, and ignore the rest. The next time I log in I would like to see highlighted whatever is new, not what I didn't read the previous time. The Sysops' assumption is erroneous that highlighting what is unread is the right thing to do.

Not meaning to insult Sysops everywhere I still say this is a common occurrence. Someone comes up with what is perceived to be a better idea and then implements it. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. When the affected users complain the frequent response is to state what the implementer thought would be good and never actually hear what the user says isn't so good.

We recently had another change that someone apparently thought was good but really isn't. The Your Notifications list has started telling me about my own posts as something someone quoted. Why is that? I don't need to be told about them, I've seen them already! But sometimes I do like to be told about a real quote. (Of course I would normally see that highlighted as a new unread item in that thread anyway. Or at least I would if it wasn't obscured now by so much fluff from unread threads I'm not not interested in.)

There is more than one BHTC (Big High-Tech Company) that does this all the time. One can postulate reasons why, such as lack of corporate or marketing backbone to admit a mistake, too much individual pride, insufficient understanding of users' actual usage patterns, etc. Some companies are quick to make adjustments, to their credit. But the first response is almost always to deny the complainers' complaints as just lack of adaptability. When that happens they are missing the point.

So in this case it is that "they" made seeing which ones are unread easier. The real point is that I (at least) don't care about that, I care about something else.

I agree that it's nice to see what is new. I don't read all posts either.

The reason I like the new system a lot better is that when I'm done reading what I want I can mark the forum as read by clicking on " Quick Links" and then "Mark Forums Read". I can mark a sub forum as read if I don't want to mark the complete forum as read if say I only had time to look at a sub forum or two. The next time I look at the forum I can see what is new.

With the old system it would sometimes timeout and mark the forum as read in the middle of trying to read it. Then you don't know what is new without looking at the time stamps if you remember the time last time you looked. With the old system I would not look at the forum unless I thought I had time to look at everything I wanted to see. I also wouldn't post sometimes as I knew it would time out while I typed.

Exactly the same reason for me. The old way was, to me, a system admin in a previous life, absolutely not efficient. Too much time wasted looking at wrongly marked read threads for posts I might have missed. This does NOT happen anymore.

In addition to a search for unread posts, some other forums I use have a way to memorize a query for new messages since last visit. If we had both it would seem the best of both worlds. Users could look for either all unread or just new since last visit - which is essentially what the old configuration did once they all flipped to "read".

This board has a lot of message activity. While I primarily read and post in just a few forums I like to skim the active thread topics regardless of forum. The short timeout before they were automatically marked read meant that I would miss things if I took too long, got interrupted, etc.

+1

I like the new system. I have lost count of the number of times I would spend enough time in a forum that it ended up marking everything read in the forums I had not yet looked at. Especially if a thread had link that I would follow. If I followed and read several of the links bikeforums would log me off and bingo! Everything is read, even the stuff that hasn't been read.

Same here. Don't use the feature. Don't use several of them...I use new posts and scan a few forums, trim subscripitions when I'm done with the thread or it's closed, even moved to P&R.


I may be a P&R superstar and I never use it, just by default of the thread getting moved there.

I like the new system MUCH better, until recently, that is.

Starting a few weeks ago, when I click on Forum Tools and Mark This Forum Read, nothing happens. Now, my unread thread lists grows and grows. What is really wierd is that sometimes reading a thread clears it from the unread list, but if I Mark This Forum Read, it can reset a huge list back to unread. WTF? Is anyone else having this problem?

I have logged out and logged in again, I cleared my browser cache, I have cleared my cookies, I shut off all my browser extensions, and I even restarted my computer and did the whole thing over. But no luck.

Interestingly, though - if I use Chrome, I get this unexplainable behaviour. If I logout and use Safari, it seems to work (at least until I login with Chrome again). So it seems like Chrome is the culprit. Anyone have any ideas? I am at a total loss here.

I just tested this on chrome browser and was able to successfully mark forums as read using the link provided under "quick links"

Perhaps check for any privacy setting or incognito mode that may be causing this.

That's actually a different tool than I was referring to, but I got the same behaviour. So it is not something caused by the Chrome browser in particular, just my installation of it.

Good suggestion. I did some digging and noticed that Chrome was warning me that cookies were being blocked, even though I explicitly white-listed the site to allow cookies. I also noted some other strange behaviour regarding javascript (allowed it, but I suspect it wasn't functioning). On a hunch, I loaded the site securely (by adding https:// to the URL), and now it seems to behave normally. I have no idea why, but at least it is working again. So thanks for the tips.