by precipitate » Mon Sep 22, 2003 11:49 am
> "Posts since last visit."
I find it completely fucking useless. Here's why:
1. It doesn't update *during* a visit, so I see everything since yesterday,
even if I've already read it. Back to the sift method. Ditto with the little
orange flag for "latest unread post." It's only the latest unread post as
determined by your status when you logged in. It never updates.
2. It doesn't retain anything between visits. So if my session times out,
or I log out, or my computer crashes, I have no way of knowing what I
read last time and what I didn't.
Yeah, I guess it's better than not retaining any read/unread status, but
with a system as high-volume and subdivided as this one, you need
something a bit more sophisticated.
I discovered something really cool this weekend that I'm trying to
duplicate, since it might be a bug. I hadn't logged in since Friday
afternoon. III had just finished reading stuff and had logged out.
I logged in, and was seeing his unread marks. That is, only stuff that was
new in the last fifteen minutes, even though it showed my last login time
as 24 hours previous. I refreshed the page a few times, because it tends
to cache the last post data/new post icon, but no change.