After I have read the last unread topic in the Chess Life Articles forum, all the topic icons are blue in my browser. When I return to the USCF Forums page, the Chess Life Articles icon is red, indicating there are unread topics. The only way I can get this icon to turn blue is by navigating to the Chess Life Articles forum, and clicking Mark topics read.
The other forums don’t behave this way.
Does anybody else have a similar problem?
I think it can happen in any of the forums. There are some posters who have been sactioned and their posts have to be approved before being released to the public. So there actually are unread posts, it is just that you can’t see them yet.
No, that’s not it. I see those posts and know when they’re there. The same thing happens to me with that forum. I have to “mark topics read” after I’ve seen all the posts.
It’s important for me because I try to read every post.
Not a new problem.
Ditto
Thanks. Not a big problem either. Was just wondering.
If it’s specific to the Chess Life articles forum, it may have to do with how the articles are ‘seeded’ into it.
Yes, I too have found that I often (perhaps not always) have to “mark topics read” in the Articles forum, it’s not enough just to actually read the topics.
It seems to happen less often (if ever) in the other forums (other than Articles).
Bill Smythe
There’s another quirk in the Articles forum, as well. If there is a full page of posts, and only one post on page 2 (or any subsequent page), the following cryptic message appears:
This seems to be an off-by-one error caused by the phantom nature of the first “post”.
Bill Smythe
It is not specific only to the Chess Life forum. Though it does mostly occur in that forum, it occasionally happens in one or more of the others as well.
This bug has been present for a LONG time. It would be nice if someone finally got around to fixing it.
– Hal Terrie
If ‘a long time’ means since September 2007, we’re still running the same version of phpbb3 we were running then.
I’ve been trying to find a few hours to upgrade us to a more current release. It won’t happen until some time in May at the earliest.
On a tangentially related subject, our ISP wants to upgrade the OS on our server, this will shut the entire website down for 10-20 minutes. I’m looking to have him do it some time next week, probably around 9AM Wednesday morning, since that’s one of the slowest times on the website.
Is there an unread post? There is the main article, of course, and it has a counter of responses that gets updated. But even clicking through to the main articles didn’t mark all the topics read. Maybe there’s another hidden topic in that forum that gets updated every time there’s a new post. If so, it would be devilishly tricky to figure out when to mark that one read.
If/when you do that, these issues might go away, only to be replaced by new quirkiness.
The Chess Life Articles forum is the one people generally stumble onto from the main pages, rather than by clicking Forums. So it’s not a big deal that the topics are not marked read for us. But the other problems in that forum are a negative advertisement.
One thing I have noticed is that the page navigation is not always available. Also, the heading is only a link on the first page. There were others, but I didn’t write them down.
The two times I did an upgrade under phpbb2 it took longer to do a backup of everything than it did to actually do the upgrade, and I don’t recall any new problems arising as a result of either upgrade.
I’m hoping to be able to test it on a backup server first, but I’m not sure I can duplicate all the things that it would be desirable to test.
We like it the way it is.
Now there’s a wise person who understands how computer software works in practice.
As for the various quirks in Articles, they all seem to stem from that “ghost” post that begins every topic in this forum.
Here’s an idea. To reduce bugs and improve user friendliness, get rid of the ghost post and replace it with a real one, something like this:
“Feel free to read the article Chess on the Moon and add your comments below.”
In addition, the author of the article, rather than SysAdmin, should be listed as the originator of the topic.
Bill Smythe
I don’t know that all the authors of the articles in Chess Life have Forum logins, but other than that this sounds like a reasonable thing to look at, though I don’t think the current programming is broken enough to make it a high priority task. (And if it ain’t broken…)
I just now visited the Chess Life Articles forum, forgot to click “Mark all topics read”, and they were so marked anyway. The articles were:
IM Ray Robson Wins Samford Fellowship
Akobian Wins Californian Challenge
Fantasy Chess Details
Has someone been working on this, or is it just inconsistent?
I don’t know if anyone has been working on it, I know I have not. Phil Smith is on his honeymoon, so it’s unlikely he has been working on it, either.
That leaves Marty, I guess.