Dizkus

How is this supposed to work? The icons are for the presence of absence of new posts since the last visit (the date/time of which is listed). But it isn't working for me and I don't understand what the issues are.

I logged in from home this morning before work, ~5:46 am my time on the East Coast of the US, looked at all the new messages, logged out.

Then around noon my time I logged in from work. Same username and password, but obviously a different ISP and IP address. All the posts I had already read this morning were listed as new since my last visit.

Now around 7:08 pm (19:08) I log in from home again and all the posts that I had reviewed at work are listed as 'New since my last visit at 9:46' which I think refers to my 5:46 log-in this morning.

I have fiddled with my time setting in personal settings - it doesn't seem to change the time of my last log-in or the time of my posts, which are both consistently 4 hours later than the time I experience for those events, suggesting that the server is 4 time zones east of me (which would make the server pretty wet?). But the time of my editing of posts is accurate.

In fact, I routinely edit posts 4 hours before I post them....look at the posting and edit times on this post, zum Beispiel.

So, I have to assume that pnForum is ignoring my log-in username and password and looking for posts since my computer last logged on. Which would be great if my computer were the one trying to keep track of what he/she has read and what is new.

But, in fact, I am doing that. And it is pretty confusing, between the time discrepancy and the fact that it is nigh on impossible to quickly determine what I have already read.

Is anyone else struggling with this? Is there something I need to change on my end to make it work? Is this the intended behavior of pnForum? If so, can it be changed to:

• 1. Keep track of posts that are new since a given username/password logged in? (This will encourage people to log in, as anonymous viewers will be missing out on a function. This strikes me as a good thing.)
  
  
• 2. Note next to the time what the reference is (e.g., 6:15 a.m. Greenland server time, or 6:15 pm pheski's time)
  
  
• 3. Somehow co-ordinate the time stamp for log-ins, posts and edits, so I stop practicing the evil art of time travel.
  
  
• 4. It would be most functional and my preference to have pnForum here keep track of posts that I have viewed or not viewed, so while I am here I can easily tell which posts I have seen even if I am not reading them in order, and so I can leave and return without having all the (unread) posts now marked as no longer new - and easily missed.
  
  

Edit: and when I just logged out and did something else for 15 minutes and then came back and logged in, all those forum groups and topics were STILL listed as 'New posts since your last visit. ( 8. May 2006 - 09:46)' but of course it isn't 9:46 yet and my last visit hasn't happened yet according to pnForum here - there is still 1 hour and 45 minutes to wait. At *that* point will those posts be correctly identified as no longer new?

If this is either a known glitch with a planned fix, or something I need to fix on my end, please tell me.

Thanks.



edited by: pheski, May 08, 2006 - 08:02 PM

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Peace
______________________________________
The commonest cause of problems is solutions.

I've had the same problem for a long time... but then again I have it with PNphpBB too :( Normally with PNphpBB though a few page reloads and it goes away. As for a workaround for finding which posts are new since your last time here, use the Latest Posts link up at the top, I prefer it to any other method of figuring out what I have / haven't seen yet.

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Member of the PNphpBB Development Team

And an added wrinkle.

Try logging on with a different browser, specifically with one that you haven't used to log into PN for 3-4 days. Hmmm. It denotes as 'new' all those posts since the last time that browser accessed the page. And, as near as I can tell, it doesn't seem to matter whether or not one logs in with the browser.

Pretty confusing.

Does this mean that the 'new' versus 'old' posting is determined by a session id that is established when a browser accesses the page, regardless of the user?

This will mean that if my wife, son, and I use the same browser on the same computer but log in with our unique and different log-in names and passwords to visit the Forum, none of us will be able to tell what we have read as opposed to what has been read by others in the household. What glorious confusion will ensue if multiple people are checking the forum from a computer in a school computer lab?

This makes no sense to me. It seems painfully obvious that the desired functionality would be that the system tracks what a user (identified by a user name and password) has accessed. The more I think about it, the less I can imagine utility for any other tracking system.

So I'm going to drop it for now and assume that it is a bug , that the devs know about it , and that it will be either fixed or explained.



edited by: pheski, May 08, 2006 - 09:52 PM

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Peace
______________________________________
The commonest cause of problems is solutions.

I can't even reliably tell when I'm logged in! The sign-in block appears at times, even when I've already logged in, so I log in again, and the sign-in block (sometimes) reappears!

Does anybody know if the pnForum or its block do above ?

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pnDev.com ~ featuring the PostNuke paid services forum