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Unread messages

PostPosted: Mon Aug 22, 2005 1:15 pm
by Dick Eades
I'm having a problem with the way this forum deals with unread messages. When I first enter the forum, I click on "posts since your last visit". and catch up on what has been posted since. This morning I loaded the main forum page and then something came up to divert me, so I minimized it until I could get back to it later. So, when I did get to it later, I thought there might be some newer posts that came in in the last 2 hrs, so I hit the reload button. Bad idea. It cleared the number of posts since my last visit and now I don't know what it is I haven't read.

This has happened to me before when I was part way through reading the unread posts and had to close the browser only to return and find that all the posts had been marked as read.

I would like to see either a change or a preference somewhere that only marks posts as read when we have acutally opened that thread and read the latest posts there. Is there already a place to mark this preference?

Unread messages

PostPosted: Mon Aug 22, 2005 1:45 pm
by Steve Baldwin
Hi Dick.

When I first signed up, and was checking out how the forum worked, I also did not like how the read/unread messages were handled. Something that I also saw as a big time-waster was not knowing which posts within a thread had already been read, and which were new.

It was suggested to me to turn on the "Watch this forum" for anything that I wanted to keep up with, then deal with it within my e-mail. That is working quite well for me. I just read everything with my web-mail, if there are pictures or some other special item that doesn't come through on the e-mail, I will click the link to see the actual forum post, then delete the e-mail message. I will, usually once a day, log in to the forum just to verify that I didn't miss anything ... or to post a reply.

PostPosted: Mon Aug 22, 2005 2:35 pm
by Dick Eades
As far as telling which posts have been read and which ones have not, within each thread there is a little box that turns from orange to white when the post has been read. Or, actually those are turned off for all posts when you log out and then back in later. My contention is that this doesn't actually mean that you have read the post, just that you visited the forum since the message was posted and therefore must have read it, which is often not the case.

I don't like reading the forum posts in my email. I would prefer that the forum nofity me that a reply has been posted and let me go there to read it. In addition to that, MailWasher has taken to marking those topic reply notifications as spam, even when I designate it as legitimate.

Unread messages

PostPosted: Mon Aug 22, 2005 3:23 pm
by Steve Baldwin
^ ...Ah.

Dick Eades wrote:...within each thread there is a little box that turns from orange to white when the post has been read...


I never noticed THAT orange or white box up by EACH MESSAGE post before. Cool!

In addition to that, MailWasher has taken to marking those topic reply notifications as spam, even when I designate it as legitimate.


Hmm. My MailWasher (Pro) at home marks the forum messages as "Friend", as it should.

Unread messages

PostPosted: Mon Aug 22, 2005 3:28 pm
by Steve Baldwin
...The main thing I don't particularly like about the e-mail is that all of the special coding (bold, italics, colors, etc.) shows as the coding syntax instead of actually showing what it does, like being bold, italics, colors, etc. ...It's just less readable that way.

PostPosted: Mon Aug 22, 2005 7:28 pm
by Dick Eades
I think the way my MailWasher Pro got to treating it as spam is that I marked some early messages for deletion but not bouncing as I was not interested in reading them in Outlook as I would rather visit the forum to read the replies. From then on MailWasher Pro has treated the forum topic replies as spam even though I consistently tag them as Friend.

And at the bottom of this reply page I am going to uncheck the box to notify me when a reply is posted. Not that I'm not interested in your reply, quite the contrary, I just don't like the topic reply notifications containing the message text going to my mail box.

Unread messages

PostPosted: Tue Aug 23, 2005 8:44 am
by Steve Baldwin
Hi Dick.

Dick Eades wrote:I think the way my MailWasher Pro got to treating it as spam is that I marked some early messages for deletion but not bouncing as I was not interested in reading them in Outlook as I would rather visit the forum to read the replies. From then on MailWasher Pro has treated the forum topic replies as spam even though I consistently tag them as Friend.


Hmm. That's strange. At work, I use my web-mail to read, then delete, but at home, I usually use MailWasher's preview window to read, then delete from MailWasher. The messages still come in as "Friend" for me.

By the way, I stopped "Bouncing" all spam messages quite some time ago. I bounced a couple back to myself from another account, so that I could see what they see when getting bounced, and even though it said the user did not exist, I did NOT like the way that it did indeed verify that the domain existed. I now just "Blacklist" and "Delete".