Sooooo ... crazy huge thanks to James #2, I think that we officially have liftoff when it comes to marking threads read. Most of the code that goes into this functionality was way above my head, and took me about three hours to comprehend 100 lines of code tonight, so super thanks to him.

Please let us know if there are any bugs with it still.

Again, super shoutout to James for three awesome features this week.

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Already found a bug related to marking a forum as read, and then not having that status carry over when articles belonging to a subforum within the forum that was marked read appear on the homepage. The logic going on throughout this feature is a mind-twister.

At least we're closer to completion of this feature, if the read status is only inaccurate from the homepage but works from forums and categories. I'll be doing training next week, but will definitely make some time to look into this (hopefully!) final piece.

commented: Good job! :) +0

Nice work folks! Also one more thing which bugs me: any way you can refresh the page after marking forums as read? The lack of prominent visual feedback sometimes makes me want to double check. Not frightfully necessary, just something I miss from the vBulletin days.

You get visual feedback in the form of the link being replaced with a confirmation message. I should be able to use some Javascript to change the icons though, easily enough. Gotta love AJAX!

OK done :) I wasn't going to implement this because it's extra resources for what I think isn't a good enough reason since there's already a visual indication that the link worked, but enough people have complained about being confused so here ya go.

commented: Nice job! :) +0

Can another Mark link be added to the top next to the RSS icon? It's rare many of us scroll below half a page.

read-icon-small Here's an icon that can be placed next to the RSS.

A thread with me as the last poster is now marked as "new". Will you change that, or leave it as it is now?

There seems to be some question as to whether the article read status logic is working properly, so if anybody sees a status that doesn't look right, please let me know. Excluding the one below, of course. ;)

A thread with me as the last poster is now marked as "new". Will you change that, or leave it as it is now?

Thanks for catching that, I fixed it not 5 minutes ago and hopefully Dani will publish to production within the day.

Although more difficult to fix I think: if I delete the last (unread) post from a thread, it's status remains unread (although it was read before that).

I'm not sure I can fix that one without first changing the way we handle last post information for the article upon deletion. Well, at least not in an efficient way, and given how often we check read status, implementing it would be a very bad idea.

But if Dani decides to change the article structure in the future to maintain latest information, the read status will automatically work as expected.

I noticed some erratic behaviour. Sometimes when reading an unread thread, then click the main menu back to where I was (so the page is refreshed, I don't hit back), some or even all other threads are marked as read too. Unfortunately, I am unable to get a reproducable case for you. It happened in Opera, as well as in IE9 (yesterday and today).

If you read the latest article in a forum, you automatically mark that forum as read.

That's the way that vBulletin always had it, so that's why I reimplemented it. 99.99% of users dont use the 'Mark Forum Read' feature so, essentially, forums get automatically marked read when you visit the latest item in the forum. It actually costs server resources to do this, I just put it back because that's the way it always was with vBulletin.

Funny, never noticed that happening on the old system... So I have to remember going bottom up from now on then.

Yeah, without that functionality, then if you aren't one of the few who manually marks forums read (like me!), then every forum will always display as unread 100% of the time, making the icons showing forum read status on the homepage kinda useless.

If you read the latest article in a forum, you automatically mark that forum as read.

Okay. The latest thread in the PHP forum was a solved thread. I avoided reading that one as per your statement above. After replying some other thread and refreshing the page, all PHP items were marked as read anyway. Is that perhaps because my new reply made it the latest?

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