Re: New Post Icons Not updating properly
Reply #2 –
That is the "usual" tricky problem of the "new" indicator for any board.
What Elk (and SMF) does is not tell you the board has unread posts, but just that you have not yet visited the board since new posts were made.
When this concept is clear, here it is what happens any time you visit a topic:
* if you open a topic from the board index (i.e. the "last message"), you get an url that looks like this:
http://www.elkarte.net/community/index.php?topic=1156.msg7674;boardseen#new
the "boardseen" parameter ensures the board is "marked as read".
when a topic is opened coming from any other source apart the board index the parameter is not added and the board is not "marked as read".
of course if you enter the board, it is "marked as read" because you enter into it.
The problem is that is counter-intuitive in most of the cases.
On my forum a long time ago, I installed a mod that at each page load does quite a bit of ugly queries (in fact several of the queries from the unread/unreadreplies pages) just to determine if the any of the boards contain unread topics and if so it uses a special icon (instead of on/off/on2).
That would likely be the idea solution. Unfortunately, this may or may not be a problem, but I suspect it would be on forums with some traffic (mine is rather small-ish and low traffic ~100k posts).
It may be possible to add a column to log_boards (or log_mark_read) to remember the...number of unread topics in a board for a certain member? That should allow to have an easy way to know if a board has unread topics or not for a certain member.