So there's no hope for a "Mark as Read" button?

An unread topic is a topic that has received a reply since you last read it. Once you read it, it's marked as read until a new reply gets posted. Along with cleaning up the topic pagination on forum pages, I'll also be implementing a link to the first unread post.

Right now, each user's topic view time is saved as a timestamp--one for every topic that you view. In order to mark an entire forum as read, I'd have to save a timestamp for your user account for each topic in the forum. That would mean hundreds of superfluous records.

I guess I'm not seeing the purpose of the "Mark Forum as Read" function. I've seen it on other forums, but I never really got the point. Can you explain why you want it?

It just makes things less cluttered, at least how I see it. I dunno. I use the function on other forums, I just like things to all be uniform and then the non-uniform stuff to be the stuff I haven't seen yet. Does that make sense? I guess if I'm the only one asking for it, don't worry about it.

All around, though, I dig the new forum.

I get it. I put it on the list. I'll figure out a way to make it work.

Thanks, Jay! I appreciate your hard work on all this for us.

Along these lines, is there a way to put the bold on the Forum Index page? I tend to find my self abandoning the site a lot by default when I come to the forum index page and see all of the topics not bolded. It's an indicator to me that there is no new content.

I also like the idea from the old forum whereby all threads are marked as read upon closing the session. At least, I think that's how it used to work.

I'm trying to work out a way to do this without it being awkward. I think automatically marking all topics as read at the end of a session defeats the purpose of having unread topics marked; either you've read a topic since the last reply or you haven't. However, I could see some users who would want only to see topics that have received a reply since their last visit marked.

I guess it's a question of what the marker means. Does it mean that the topic has had activity that you haven't seen yet, or is it simply a notification that something has occurred since your last visit?

I'll probably roll these two options up into a user preference and let the user determine the behavior.