So, I’ve finally found out why vBulletin and nearly every other forum system on the Internet mess with my unread settings. Apparently, while they’ll track unread posts since my last session, and then track which posts I read within that session, as soon as my session expires, all that tracking data is lost, and it essentially assumes that I read every single thread while I was on the board.
Is this just the way that vBulletin works, or is it a setting somewhere? Am I the only one that this really irritates?
It’s just the way vBulletin works. If you haven’t refreshed or read a new page within 20 minutes, it resets your ‘You last visited:’ time and now only new messages since that point will flag threads as unread.
Interestingly enough if you go to a thread, any previously unread messages will be marked with an orange ‘unread’ flag, even if the thread itself was not so marked in the topic list, so it does still remember on some level. Edit: Though they do eventually expire on their own too, so there may be some other time limit on that.
