[Black_Talon]

I am sick and tired of the short amount of time I have to browse the forums before the "new posts" icons and the "go to first new post" notification disappears. It lasts somewhere between 30 and 60 minutes depending on some sick, twisted design that I'm not aware of.

I logon to the forums here and start reading posts as fast as possible so I can "beat the clock", and typically I don't. After the icons disappear it takes me much longer to browse the forums because I have to pay close attention to the time/date of every post until I read all the posts that were made since I last visited. This is BS. Why in Gods name does this notification have to expire so quickly, or expire AT ALL for the session that I'm browsing?

I read and participate on 10-12 forums every day, 7 days per week, 52 weeks per year and NO other forum behaves as badly as THR. Several others do have a time limit on these notifications, but none are even remotely as fast as THR. I doubt that it's something inherent in the vBulletin software because it's used on several of the other forums that I visit every day and I don't have this problem there.

Dear Mister Forum Webmaster, can you please help little Black_Talon browse the THR forums in an efficient manner so he doesn't throw something at his monitor again. Thank you very much...

[/rant]

[Ledbetter]

Be at ease.

Log in and click on "View new posts" at the top right of the forum page. Browse away.

[Mal H]

I tend to agree with you, Black_Talon. I can be composing a fairly long reply or something of that nature and I come back and the "new" posts are no longer indicated. One work-around is to remember approximately when you signed on and just go by the timestamps of the threads in a forum.

You can do as Ledbetter suggests and you know will always have only the new posts on the list even if the icons change.

Meanwhile, I'll see if anything can be done on our end ....

[A little later]
Ok, I added a few minutes to the timeout. We can't make it a very long period or it plays heck with the number of logged in user count. We'll see if there is an improvement with the change.

Another thing you can do to defeat the timeout is to try to remember to go back every now and then and do something such as refresh a screen, that will reset the timer. I know it's not always easy to remember to do that when you're busy reading or composing.

[Black_Talon]

Another thing you can do to defeat the timeout is to try to remember to go back every now and then and do something such as refresh a screen, that will reset the timer.

Do you mean if you hit the "reload" button on the browser to refresh the page, doing that will reset the "counter" to zero? Can it be any page or does it have to be the main forum page or what?

I know it's not always easy to remember to do that when you're busy reading or composing.

Oh, it'll be easy for me to remember because then I can browse slower, read more posts, post more and just generally take more time to enjoy the rich content here at THR.

[P95Carry]

Log in and click on "View new posts" at the top right of the forum page. Browse away. That for sure is one way to go ....... plus get email notification for your subscribed threads. These two things between them work quite well.

Beyond that.... well ...... as we know, this place is so popular and it is inevitable that with all the input, things are movin pretty fast .... I still miss threads early on and find them later.:p

[Mal H]

B_T - You can reload any page (or load a new page) to reset the timer. The main that will get you is when there is long "think time" and nothing gets transferred for the timeout period.

[Black_Talon]

Feedback after a few days after the "timer change" and reloading a page occaisionally:

Things are much better. I haven't been timed out yet.

Thanks Mal H for the software tweak and your advise, I appreciate it!