Forge Software capabilities?

[Brian Leybourne]

Is there any way to set up my account (or the Forge itself) so that every time I visit a thread, it resets the "new since last login" for that thread only?

The reason I ask is that I like to connect into the Forge and keep my connection open during the day, refreshing every time I have spare time to read messages. Now, if there is a thread that is seeing a lot of activity during the day, once I read the new messages and refresh the page, it will no longer show the yellow "new messages in this thread" clickable icon, which is cool. Twenty minutes later, when I refresh the page again, that icon will return showing me that even though I have not logged off and then on again, it's recognised that a new message(s) has been posted in that thread since I last accessed the thread. This is also cool.

But, when I then click on that icon, it doesn't take me to the new message since last time I accessed the thread, but takes me back to the new messages since last time I logged on (so starting with ones I have already read today). This isn't cool, especially if a thread is seeing a lot of action and has gone over a page or a couple of pages. It means having to move backwards and forwards through the thread, searching manually for the first message I have not actually read.

Ron/Clinton, Is there any way to fix this? Am I even explaining myself properly?

Thanks,
Brian.

[Clinton R. Nixon]

Brian,

You're explaining the problem well.

Yes, it's frustrating.

Nope, can't fix it. I'll explain, though - that information is kept as data about your session, which is a construct used to make the web seem like a stateful protocol - that is, an entity which you can keep a conversation going with - instead of a stateless protocol, which it is.

Now, I get to choose how long these sessions are. If you interact with the Forge during this session, the time counter goes back to 0. Think of it this way: if sessions are 20 minutes long, and you don't interact for 21 minutes, it's a new session. If you interact after 19 minutes and 30 seconds, though, your session's extended another 20 minutes. (By the way, sometimes sessions get jacked up. No, I don't know why, although I can tell you that using two browsers with the same account at the same time'll do it.)

Sessions are extremely long on the Forge, so people can spend six hours typing a reply if they feel like it. This is the cause of your problem. I apologize that it's beyond my ability to fix.

[Brian Leybourne]

Clinton,

Thanks for the explanation.

It's a bit frustrating, but really a fairly minor inconvenience in the grand scheme of things. I guess I can live with it :-)

Brian.

[Stuart DJ Purdie]

Sessions are extremely long on the Forge, so people can spend six hours typing a reply if they feel like it. This is the cause of your problem.

Just a thought, but is it possible to put the session timeout into a per-user configuration setting?  I've done it before, in a different board system, so it's theoretically possible, in principle.  However, if it's not a default option, it may be beyond a sensible to implement.  I'll have a poke over the code later, but I php really isn;t my thing, so I thought I'd throw the idea out.

Course, the problem with that is it's easy to set it to something that makes little sense, so YMMV.  But posters here seem more clueful that the average board, so hopefully it wouldn't cause a problem.