Mark as read

Good idea. Currently, “new” means “updated in the last 24 hours”, as you might have guessed (and consistently-so, across the website). We don’t keep track of whether you’ve read a thread. I’ll have a think how we might manage that.

Thinking about this earlier, you could store the time of the last visit and then mark anything posted since that time as new? Saves having to keep track of who’s been looking at what.

A “New” flag could mean two things –

• ‘New’ messages since I last visited.

• ‘New’ messages that I’ve not read yet.

Under the first option if I was visit the ‘index page’ and then read, say the first ‘new’ message in the list, then loaded the index page again, the other ‘new’ flags would disappear as my last visit was only a couple of minutes ago. This would not be very useful as further down the list there might be other ‘unread’ messages I’d like to know are ‘new’,

On the other hand, if I am visiting from a browser where I am not ‘logged in’ then having ‘recent’ new items flagged would be useful as well.

I can do a ‘new since last logged in’ quite quickly. I suspect it might suit some people, but those who never log out (and/or those who don’t use more than one PC, since we don’t allow more than one concurrent login at a time) would find it irritating.

However, doing a ‘new since last visit’ is considerably more difficult: what is “a visit”? If I can work that out, I’d love to fix the ‘new’ flag…

You’ll spot that we now mark posts you’ve not yet seen as NEW; and threads you’ve not yet seen as UNREAD.

As a caveat – clearly, we’ve not been spotting what you’ve read or not read until now, so most of the threads will be marked as UNREAD. Technically, they’re only marked as “READ” once you get to the last post, too. But, from hereon in, it should be considerably simpler to know what you’ve read and what you haven’t.

http://www.mediauk.com/me now contains a “mark all as read” function.

Of interest…

This graph shows the growth of discussion traffic here. Feb 5 was the day I added the personalised New and unread indicators for logged-in users. Just goes to show…

You’re welcome :-)

Seriously though, thanks, and keep those features coming, it is appreciated.