Note to self: The “review posts since your last visit” function on the AoC boards is moderately flaky, especially when there’s amount of activity. I’ve spotted (fortunately, by cross-reference) several notes that never showed up in the display only by going out and actually spotting them there. Rrg.
The problem to a degree is on the ‘since last visit’ part. If you don’t hit ‘logout’ when you go to leave, you stay logged in for a bit and posts that go up in that time aren’t necessarily displayed. Usually it isn’t a big deal since, well, their isn’t that much being posted up. But I guess lately it has been pretty crazy.
It does seem to update with a Refresh. What seems to hang it up is that the “last visit” seems to (sometimes?) take into account my last post. So if I look at the list, start to write a reply to one, someone posts something new, then I post my reply, that new post might not be visible int he last visit screen.
Oh, well.
I would like to point out once more, that PhPBB is NOT my preferred forum tool, but it was the best we had on hand at the time the forums went up and I have a hard enough time keeping it updated and getting the hosting service to stop overwriting my updates to it so I’ve never even pondered swapping to a different bit of forum software because of all the headaches involved and I wrote this all as one really long run-on sentence didn’t I when I really should have chopped it into smaller ones which is a good sign I’ve had too much caffiene so far today already.
And that came out really whiny, but yeah. PhPBB is a simply solution, but not a great piece of forum software. If I EVER am silly enough to do a community like the AoC again, I am sooo spending more time at the beginning getting stuff like better forum software and more sensible moderation and the like done first.
Y’know, there are things I’d like to improve on it (like an RSS feed, maybe by forum group), but they’re mostly trivial. It does the job it needs to do. No worries. (At least from an user end of things.)
I, too, have noticed some “flakiness” recently.
Normally, I “Log in to check your private messages.” Lately, however, I’ve been using the “Log in” link and finding myself logged in and right back out. Hence, when I log in again and attempt to view “View posts since last visit,” it displays the ”
No topics or posts met your search criteria” message. This leaves me with the mildly annoying task of tracking down all the posts I haven’t seen by looking at the timestamps.