Bug overview description.
I noticed that in clicking a unread thread at the top of the forum index the system automatically marks all threads that are below that one on the list and have unread comments as read without even being opened..

What part(s) of the site page(s) are affected?
Forum

What is the expected behavior?
Any thread below the opened thread on the list remains highlighted as unread until clicked on and opened

What actual behavior is given instead?
Multiple unread threads, if i click on the top most thread or thread somewhere in the middle it also automatically marks the unread threads below the one clicked on as read.

Time of incident. (If applicable)
unknown, only now noticed

Can you reproduce the bug every time?
yes

What steps did you take to replicated this bug?
-wait for 2 or more threads to become highlighted from new unread replies
-click and open the top most unread thread
-return to forum index

Errors or other messages returned. (If any)
no

PS: stickied threads dont seem to cause this effect.

From what I remember, that's working as intended.
There's no 'mark all as read' feature, and it'd be inconvenient if we had to open every single topic (even uninteresting ones) to unmark them as 'new'.

Genjar said:
From what I remember, that's working as intended.
There's no 'mark all as read' feature, and it'd be inconvenient if we had to open every single topic (even uninteresting ones) to unmark them as 'new'.

There is a mark all as read, on the right side of the bisect, opposite of help.

However, I'm perfectly fine with it working like it is right now, it does not do harm IMO.

Siral_Eurgh-xan said:
There is a mark all as read, on the right side of the bisect, opposite of help.

However, I'm perfectly fine with it working like it is right now, it does not do harm IMO.

why i marked it as minor as its a minor annoyance thru small things can always also be a sign for a bigger issue that has not yet been noticed.

Siral_Eurgh-xan said:
There is a mark all as read, on the right side of the bisect, opposite of help.

Huh. So there is. Forgot about that, because there's never been any need to use it.

Genjar said:
Huh. So there is. Forgot about that, because there's never been any need to use it.

I know, I don't use it in favor of the bug. Just click and choose which I want, and read the top one, but I use a mobile so it doesn't auto-refresh the page after clicking refresh, or etc., which means I keep them all as unread (at least it's not the annoying you have mail pop up...)

So, I don't think it "needs" to be fixed. I won't say anything about time spent addressing this, so I can't say whether or not it should be looked into, but it is not something that needs to be addressed here and now.

We've been looking at maybe fixing up how this is done. Right now it takes the time of the last post in the thread and uses that as the last viewed time. So viewing newer threads marks all of the others below it as read. Simple, but not the best solution.

Genjar said:
Huh. So there is. Forgot about that, because there's never been any need to use it.

Maybe for users that only want to join in on entertaining topics rather than productive ones and just want to clean the latter out.

Related possible bug: (I'll move this to a dedicated post if necessary/already known)

The Forum link (at the top of the site page menubar) becomes italicized even for subforum categories that are marked as hidden

i.e if you have General hidden, but all other categories are visible and marked as read, a new post in General causes a change of

Forum -> Forum

even though it's hidden

KiraNoot said:
We've been looking at maybe fixing up how this is done. Right now it takes the time of the last post in the thread and uses that as the last viewed time. So viewing newer threads marks all of the others below it as read. Simple, but not the best solution.

Yeah, unfortunately there's a problem with that: If the topic got updated since the thread list was loaded, but before that topic was clicked, you suddenly mark everything as "read" because of that.

Furrin_Gok said:
Yeah, unfortunately there's a problem with that: If the topic got updated since the thread list was loaded, but before that topic was clicked, you suddenly mark everything as "read" because of that.

I agree, just explaining how it currently works, since it seems often misunderstood exactly how it functions, and why it often marks more or less than expected as read.

The problem with storing individual thread read-times serverside is that the number of records can grow pretty quickly. A few thousand users reading a few hundred forum posts is already in the millions. Not that that number is unheard of, we've got about 2.7 million comments now. Are those user/thread estimates high? I have no idea how many people actually read the forum.

Alternatively you could store them in cookies or local storage, but then it wouldn't work cross-device like most other stuff on the site does.