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.

Good news for those of you who asked for this feature...it's just about done. I now have a new beta working that only marks topics as unread when they've been updated since your last session. Once your session ends, all topics are marked as read.

As I said in my previous post, I'll probably implement a user setting that allows you to select which method you want (topics marked as read at session end or topics always marked unread until you've read them).

Still working on the "Mark forum as read" thing. You'll probably see it in the same update when it happens.