Shouldn't this better be called:
...because "their" is correct for female users, for male users it must be "his". Or?
English isn't my native language (you know) but IIRC it's his or her for the gender specific variant and "their", if you don't know the gender?!?
Maybe "Viewing unread topics since my last visit"
But I thought "their" is for more then one person? English is not my native language too. "My" seems also not to fit right, because then you have to say "I am posting a message" instead of "user is posting a message". ;)
Where are the experts when you need them? :-D
English isn't my native language either but I'm a teacher of it. As TE said, you can use "their" referring to a single person whose gender is not known. I think that's a text string used for Who's Online, so "my" wouldn't be a good option.
That's a funny one really, its one of the gaps in the English language, i.e a lack of a gender generic singular pronoun.
You could do the awkward thing and use "... since he or she last ..." but that is a bit stiff, no one speaks like that.
You could also use "he" in this case, but that would probably be taken as sexist as most readers will assume he=male regardless of the sentence structure.
One could reword it like, Viewing unread topics since they last visited. This is pretty common "work around" although it is still using a plural pronoun (they) in a singular context.
So its a language deficiency, I blame the English !
Technically, "one's profile" is also okay to use.
"Their" is a tad more appropriate though.
English ain't my mother tongue but at least it means I can French-kiss her. 8)
Could it not be shorter like:
"Viewing unread topics"
regards,
Maxx
I feel it ok with current layout. May be we add a details hover text when someone moves cursor over to the " New Posts " button.
There is an option for post preview on hover, it can either be the first or last post of the topic you are hovering on. Its not enabled on the site right now, its an admin option to have it enabled.
Thinking about it some, I wonder if that makes more sense as a user option, that is one of those love / hate items.
If you make it a user option, make a permission/options to allow users to do that. I think there was a topic on SMF where Ben_S turned it off and saw much better performance. I think he also tuned his forum from 20 to 10 topics/messages per page.