New Posts & Countdowns

[SMAX]

You may have noticed a couple of changes on the site over the last few days.

Firstly countdowns now only count DOWN and not up. Once the time on the countdown reaches zero it displays a message that can be user set on the countdowns setting page. The reason for this change is that many members got confused thinking other members only had a short time before their trip when the countdown was actually counting up and that member was back home.

Secondly New Posts.

Once you have read a thread or replied on it then it vanishes from new posts until there is an unread post on that thread again.

This way is a lot more accurate. The old way would mark all posts as read after you had been on the site for 30 minutes even if you hadn't read them. If you browsed for a bit then went off and came back 10 minutes later it would show all the posts you had read as unread again.

If you use multiple devices you would get different results on the different devices. You can now browse the forums on your desktop and then pick up your iPad or laptop and carry on there knowing the read posts will be the same.

It is actually how most other forums work. We could not do it before due to the high resources it used on the server. This new server is a lot more powerful so it is a feature we can now use.

With people using mobile devices a lot more now I am sure those people will appreciate the continuity between their devices.

You can also use "My Active Threads" on the menu to show all the threads you have posted in and the last post on that thread. It is a quick way of keeping up with the threads you have posted in.

If you really want to go back the old ways of doing it then you can do this in USER CP and edit Options. Look for the 'Thread Display Options' section and switch back to 'Cookie'. But the Database method is better for continuity across devices.