Dark blue color of Forum titles indicating unread posts

[Dirk Enzmann]

As I understand the dark blue color of Forum titels' icons indicates that within a forum there are posts still not read. The same is true with topics within a forum: The title of a topic is dark blue instead of light blue if it contains unread posts.

However, the icon befor the titel of "Using the Forum" is dark blue although all topics within the forum are light blue (thus there shouldn't be any unread posts within the forum):


I also checked the filter of this forum, it says "all time", "all", "date - last update", "descending" which means that if there is any unread post within any of the topics this topic should be shown first - but all topics' posts are actually read and (and I really read the topic on top).

By the way: It would be a very helpful feature if it were possible to jump to the oldest (not most recent) topic containing an unread post immediatey by opening the forum contents (as it is possible by using the small icon left to the title of a topic to jump to the first unread post within a topic) although all topics are sorted descending by "date - last update".

[Dirk Enzmann]

Reading once more my last post, I recognize that my question/comment is difficult to comprehend. What I simply meant to say is that the color of the icon (bubble?) next to "Using the Forum" is dark blue (as shown in the screen shot) although all topics of "Using the Forum" are marked as read. In fact, the color of the topics with in the forum are light blue (which is correct because there are no unread topics). Consequently the color of the bubble next to "Using the Forum" should be gray - being dark blue obvioulsy is an error of the forum software.

Because the behavior might be related to my browser: I am using Mozilla Firefox version 19.02.

[Richard Williams]

Remember, the topics may spread across several pages, so there might be unread topics on p. 2 or 3 or whatever that you aren't seeing. If you are sure that isn't the case, then I don't know what the problem would be.

[Dirk Enzmann]

I went through all pages (in this case two) and all topics are marked as "all posts read" (I did not went through all topics themselves, though, but this should not make any difference).

I would have liked to experiment with using the button "mark all topics as read", but unfortunately this is not possible because the respective button is lacking for me in the "Using the Forum" forum as I already showed in a post to a topic (=thread) by Rich Goldstein (perhaps the both problems are related?).

[Richard Williams]

That "Mark this forum read" button is elusive. Sometimes I see it, sometimes I don't. Sometimes I see it for one forum but not another.

[Phil Schumm]

What I simply meant to say is that the color of the icon (bubble?) next to "Using the Forum" is dark blue (as shown in the screen shot) although all topics of "Using the Forum" are marked as read. [...] Because the behavior might be related to my browser: I am using Mozilla Firefox version 19.02.

I believe this is due to topics being moved out of the forum/section before you have read them; they then stay stuck in the unread state (within the forum in which they were originally posted) with no way to clear this. The workaround, as you guessed, is to use the "Mark This Forum Read" button, but as Richard noted, this is not always visible. I see exactly the same behavior under Safari, so this is not unique to your browser.

I was able to clear this by using the "Mark This Forum Read" button that appears in the lower right-hand corner of the main forums page. Sometimes the button is elusive here too, but if you access the page by first going into a particular forum (i.e., so you can see the list of topics) and then clicking on the "Forums" link in the breadcrumbs at the top of the page, it should reveal itself.

BTW, I've often observed the opposite behavior—that is, a forum is marked as read (i.e., gray bubble) even though it contains unread posts. This seems to happen most frequently with the General forum.

[Dirk Enzmann]

Thanks - a really helpful workaound!

Sometimes the button is elusive here too, but if you access the page by first going into a particular forum (i.e., so you can see the list of topics) and then clicking on the "Forums" link in the breadcrumbs at the top of the page, it should reveal itself.

Following your advice, I can see the "mark as read" button right of "Filter" for the first time (although not in the "header" line above but in a new header line beneath):



When I use the button to mark all entries as "read", the color of the icon in front of "Using the Forum" eventually changes from dark blue (unread topics) to gray (all topics read).

Thanks!

[Richard Williams]

Why can't that "Mark forum read" button be there all the time? I am thinking that maybe we are secretly in a social psych experiment, e.g. a reversibility design where sometimes the button is there, sometimes it isn't, and they want to see how it affects our behavior, e.g. do we read more threads when we can't mark them as read?