Forum post "New" flag

I think that got deployed sometime on Friday. Glad to hear you like it.

Maybe I am missing something, but while new posts to a topic get the 'new' flag, completely new topics are not marked in any way (of course they count towards the 'new posts' counter in the forum overview; quite confusing).

Also, I often have the problem that new topics and new post within a topic do not show up (the post itself, not the 'new' label) unless I explicitly refresh the page (F5). Happens both on my PC (Opera 55) and smartphone (some chrome version of Android 6).

chozo wrote:

Maybe I am missing something, but while new posts to a topic get the 'new' flag, completely new topics are not marked in any way (of course they count towards the 'new posts' counter in the forum overview; quite confusing).

I recommend that you bookmark https://www.wavemetrics.com/tracker and use that to see a list of new posts. IMO, this is the most reliable way to get informed of new posts.

chozo wrote:

Also, I often have the problem that new topics and new post within a topic do not show up (the post itself, not the 'new' label) unless I explicitly refresh the page (F5). Happens both on my PC (Opera 55) and smartphone (some chrome version of Android 6).

I might be misunderstanding your point, but on most forum web sites, you need to refresh the page to see new posts, don't you? At least that's my experience. I can't think of any parts of the new site that dynamically update a page's content without the page needing to be reloaded. We're not at the level of Gmail or anything like that :)

aclight wrote:

I recommend that you bookmark https://www.wavemetrics.com/tracker and use that to see a list of new posts. IMO, this is the most reliable way to get informed of new posts.

Nice!

The thing I miss is the ability to mark all new posts as read _en masse_. Any thoughts on implementing this feature?

jjweimer wrote:

The thing I miss is the ability to mark all new posts as read _en masse_. Any thoughts on implementing this feature?

The company that created our new web site tells me that implementing this would be quite expensive, so this probably isn't in the cards for the near future.

Fair enough.

aclight wrote:

chozo wrote:

Also, I often have the problem that new topics and new post within a topic do not show up (the post itself, not the 'new' label) unless I explicitly refresh the page (F5). Happens both on my PC (Opera 55) and smartphone (some chrome version of Android 6).

I might be misunderstanding your point, but on most forum web sites, you need to refresh the page to see new posts, don't you? At least that's my experience. I can't think of any parts of the new site that dynamically update a page's content without the page needing to be reloaded. We're not at the level of Gmail or anything like that :)

Ok, my post was a bit misleading here (I had only 5 hours of sleep yesterday ;). I meant that when I click a link to a subforum or when I click a link to the thead in said subforum I expect to see the latests threads/posts. But instead I see just old threads/posts unless I press F5. The browser displays most problably the version of the site which was saved in cache last time, so I guess it is a problem with checking/updating the cache. Currently I have the habit of just pressing F5 after clicking anything on wavemetrics.com just to make sure.

Testing today with firefox does not seem to show this behavior but I'll stick to what I have. You may say that this is just a bug within Opera/Chrome (I guess they use the same Blink engine, too, so no surprises here), but so far I only see this happen here in the forum and maybe one or two other sites occasionally. I just wondered if there may be an easy fix.

Hm....I use Chrome exclusively and I don't think I've ever seen this problem.

It would be useful if you could provide exact steps to reproduce this (particularly the URLs). It's entirely possible that you're doing something slightly different from what I'm doing, and thus I've never seen the issue.

I do nothing special, just going to https://www.wavemetrics.com/forum/ and clicking my way to the posts. It seems to not occur every time, but then it is actually difficult to notice that something is amiss. I try to look for clues and report back when I find something. Maybe I get myself some tools to watch the cache closely.

I find that the presence of "new" or "updated" indicators (beneath the "Title" header) depends on whether or not I am logged in to the Forum (using Mozilla Firefox 61.0.1, Win10). None of the previous posts have mentioned this factor.

s.r.chinn wrote:

I find that the presence of "new" or "updated" indicators (beneath the "Title" header) depends on whether or not I am logged in to the Forum (using Mozilla Firefox 61.0.1, Win10). None of the previous posts have mentioned this factor.

For me as well, they only show up when logged in the forum.  But, as I recall, this behavior is similar to that of the old Igor Exchange forums.

s.r.chinn wrote:

I find that the presence of "new" or "updated" indicators (beneath the "Title" header) depends on whether or not I am logged in to the Forum (using Mozilla Firefox 61.0.1, Win10). None of the previous posts have mentioned this factor.

Yes, that's the expected behavior. These tags are user specific, so it is not appropriate to show them unless you are logged in.

https://www.wavemetrics.com/forum/general/3d-plot-three-1d-waves is a form topic which takes forever to load and thus does not clear the New flag.

Edit: The firefox webconsole tells me that

https://www.wavemetrics.com/forum/general/image/png;base64,iVB...

That happens when someone tries to paste an image into the editor instead of uploading an image file separately.

I cleaned out the in-line image, and this should make it load more quickly and thus register that you have read it.

Thanks Jim.

Possibly related to some of the previous discussion: sometimes forum pages aren't up to date the first time they load. I've been experiencing this since the switch to wavemetrics.com, and it just seems to happen randomly. I can often tell when it is going to happen because the most recent poster advertised on the board doesn't match the most recent post when I enter a specific forum board or post.

Here are screenshots from a moment ago, when I could tell I was having the issue. I'd been on the main forum page, which said hrodstein had posted last in the General forum (~21 minutes ago). I clicked the link to General and took the first screenshot -- the most recent post appears to be by saferr one hour ago. Then I hit refresh and took the second screenshot -- most recent post by hrodstein as advertised.

It has happend for conversations, not just the boards/indexes. Sometimes the most recent post(s) are missing until I hit refresh. I've only used chrome so I am not sure if it's specific to it. 

I suspect this is due to the fact that when you're not logged in, you're served cached pages. When you're logged in, you're (mostly?) served newly generated pages. There may be issues with things not clearing the cache at the appropriate time. But if you always login, then I think you'll see that the problem goes away. And then you have the benefit that the New tags will be more accurate.