# "Recent Post" flag seems to be random



## jrm01 (Oct 17, 2003)

The "Recent Post" flag and associated Checkmark seem to randomly disappear from my Thread List. Today I logged onto one forum and had 10-12 Threads "checked". When I switched to another forum and came back all the Check Marks were gone. Did something change, or am I doing something wrong?


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## David Bott (Jan 1, 1999)

Hi...It is based on time. If you spent 15 mins or so in an area, when you came back, they could have been reset. (or if you logged out and back in).


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## jrm01 (Oct 17, 2003)

David, Thank you for the response.

The problem that I am having seems to be something that just started recently. I just logged onto the Help forum and had 15-20 Recent Post flags. I read one, and then went to S3 forum. When I came back to Help Forum, all the flags had been reset. I know that logging out and back in would reset them, but a simple forum switch seems to be doing the same thing now. Very, very frustrating.


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## choccy (Jan 1, 2001)

I'm having the opposite issue.. I'm getting the same posts even though I've already read them. I go away and come back, and I'm still seeing the same posts. I'm having to use 'jump to last post' to read new posts.


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## jrm01 (Oct 17, 2003)

Yup. That's why I described it as random, but only gave an exampe of one side. Today I had 3 flags on the list for one forum, went to another forum and back five minutes later and had 15-20 flags dating back to yesterday. I think there is a cookie monster in my computer.


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## David Bott (Jan 1, 1999)

You can trying logging out and then looking at your cookies to be sure you do not have hane TCF cookies left. Then log back in. Maybe that will do it.

Thanks


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## dswallow (Dec 3, 2000)

This sort of problem is almost always related to the tcthread_lastview cookie. It's been an ongoing issue with vBulletin for years -- a known issue -- that they seem to constantly rewrite their cookie handling to fix, but always just find new ways to have it broken because they're ignoring a fact of life with browser cookies -- a maximum size.

People who read a lot of threads and rarely close down every browser window they have open are the ones most likely to encounter this problem. The problem is that over time the tcthread_lastview cookie is appended with the thread ID and last read date/time of every thread you read in the forum. When the cookie reaches its maximum length, nothing is ever done by vBulletin to deal with it -- it just keeps trying to append to the cookie each time you read a thread. But now, only threads you've already read will behave properly because any new thread you read gets appended (and truncated), but any old thread you read that's already in the cookie is just updated and continues to behave properly.

If you use Firefox, you can just delete the offending cookie when it starts happening.

A simple fix/workaround would be for vBulletin's cookie update code for tcthread_lastview be modified so that if it sees the length of the cookie is beyond a certain size, it prunes out info on older threads. Or it could just be modified to prepend new thread info and updated thread info to the cookie and older stuff automatically just falls off the end when it reaches the max length.

A more proper fix would be to store this data server-side where there aren't such limitations. There is a max length client-side per cookie as well as a max number of cookies per site so any other solution only changes where the problem is encountered rather than fixes it for good.


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## choccy (Jan 1, 2001)

OK, that makes sense. I'm dealing with a similar problem with a customer who refuses to believe there is a limit to how much data you can stuff in a cookie, despite what all the testing proves


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## jrm01 (Oct 17, 2003)

Doug, Thanks for the great explanation. I definately am guilty of visiting many threads.forums and never closing my browser (until XP crashes or hangs). I just do a Standby everynight and pick right back up again in the morning.

Am I understanding you right that this will be less of a problem if I close IE at least once a day and start over?


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## dswallow (Dec 3, 2000)

jrm01 said:


> Am I understanding you right that this will be less of a problem if I close IE at least once a day and start over?


As long as all the iexplore.exe processes go away when you close all the windows (check via task manager), yes, that should alleviate the problem... well, at least as long as you don't read enough different threads to get the cookie past its max length again before closing and restarting IE.


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