thread colors off?

[sbarnet]

Sorry if this has been asked and answered but I can't find it. When I go into any forum most of the threads are colored grey for no new posts even though they are threads I may have never looked at. Shouldn't they be grey after I have viewed them and they have no new posts?
steph

[sbarnet]

bump

[splitcoaststampers]

I'll try and answer this one, though I may not be quite accurate. but a mostly right answer is probably better than no answer, right? :^)

the forum software has two different ways of tracking new posts. one way would be the way you mention - it would keep track of every post for every user, and know which ones they'd read and which ones they hadn't. well, that would be a problem. with about 3 million posts and thousands of accounts you'd have to multiply 90,000 accounts x 3,000,000 to get the number of tracked 'items' for the system to handle.

since the prospect of the above is very scary (270 billion?), we've chosen an alternate method that instead (and this is the part I'm not quite certain about) makes some approximations based on when your last visit to the site was.

so don't expect to see complete accuracy from the 'new posts' thing, but in my experience it seems to do an okay job overall.