Posts from the last 24 hours

[wlmr]

I have occasionally left this site sitting idle while following a link from within a post and had my log-in time out. Tonight I has some type of PC issue that temporarily froze my PC and had to use the windows task manager to stop everything including my current session here.

There's identifiable reasons for both of these issues and that's not what I need help with. Here's my problem:
In either of these cases, when I log back in, everything I hadn't had a chance to read is now marked as read. Used to be I could just hit the newer post button and if there were NO new posts it would automatically let me see the last 24 hour's worth of posts as a pre-canned search.

That doesn't happen now and when I go into the search area I can't just search for the last day's worth of posts without entering some search term/word longer than 2 characters in length. I'm expecting there's some glaringly obvious thing I'm missing.

Help!

[sjcscanner]

The Today's Posts button shows you recent posts, i assume the last 24 hours worth. It's under the login bar in the top right.

EDIT: Now that I look, this only works if you are logged out.

[loumaag]

wlmr:
Even if your computer setup would not log you out for some time-out thing you have set up, the site will eventually mark everything as read even if you were still looking at things. I don't have a handle on how long that takes but as you can imagine the moderation staff occasionally has this happen to them when we are on for extended periods of time. As for the default search you are mention, I really don't know; I never used the view new posts feature at all.

Once you have everything read, what shows up when you click it? I just opened it and it shows a bunch of things I haven't looked at plus some that I have (they are no longer highlighted) so I am unclear as to what happens when you do it.

[wlmr]

Thanks for your responses.

The today's post will likely work for what I need it for.

Lou, what used to happen is pretty much as you describe if you're still online when you time out. My trick then was to use the quick links - mark everything as read - and then hit the new posts. If there are none available it used to then come back with an option to view the last 24 hours. I've never manually been able to use the search function to see everything for a specific time window, it always gets picky about having to have an entry in the text field rather than either accepting a wild card or no entry as a "give me everything" type of search.

[Jay911]

I never explicitly log out of the site in any way (forums, DB, etc). The only time I get the "Sorry, there are no new threads to view" message (the one wlmr describes in the post above) is when the site has managed to lose my login credentials, and I'm no longer logged in to the site/forums. I find this happens when I visit the site from a different computer than the one I last logged in from. This is something that frustrates me about the Internet; I have at least a couple dozen computers and devices I might visit the site from, and I always select "Remember me" so the login cookie should be saved on every computer I use. Right now I'm on my home computer; if I go to the firehall and visit the site from there, even though I've visited RR from there before and selected "Remember me", I will have to log in again (and will get the "there are no new threads to view" message if I go right to New Posts). This happens on all forums and sites where I log in, netwide.

Regarding the original question, ending your session here might have caused either the session ID or the IP address to change, depending on how far you had to take your computer down. I am not familiar enough with vBulletin to know how it determines what is a new session, but I'd suspect that killing your browser and/or entire PC and restarting it would be a primary culprit.

[wayne_h]

I concur with Jay. It sounds like how the site is treating changes on your computer end wlmr (i.e., your attempt to log in again due to cookie changes). This has always been a peeve of mine with vbulletin as it commonly happens at other forums too.

At the moment the forum timer is set to 30 min of inactivity before it marks everything read.

Here's what options vbulletin gives you:

1. Inactivity/Cookie Based - once a user has been inactive for a certain amount of time (the value of the session timeout option) all threads and forums are considered read. Individual threads are marked as read within a session via cookies.

   This option is how all versions of vBulletin before 3.5 functioned.

2. Database (no automatic forum marking) - this option uses the database to store thread and forum read times. This allows accurate read markers to be kept indefinitely. However, in order for a forum to be marked read when all threads are read, the user must view the list of threads for that forum.

   This option is more space and processor intensive than inactivity-based marking.

3. Database (automatic forum marking) - this option is the same as a previous option, but forums are automatically marked as read when the last new thread is read.

   This is the most usable option for end users, but most processor intensive.

We use option 1 because the others are processor intensive.

[wlmr]

Originally Posted by sjcscanner

The Today's Posts button shows you recent posts, i assume the last 24 hours worth. It's under the login bar in the top right.

EDIT: Now that I look, this only works if you are logged out.

sjcscanner,

If you mark everything as read under the quick links dropdown, the new posts will return a mostly empty search. While still logged in, the Today's Posts under the Forum button will now show the last 24 hours. That's what I'm going to be using whenever I run into the situation again.