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Its never happened to me, but I think I've read of it happening to others. Can't remember the topic. I don't have Zone Alarm.

I also have Zone Alarm Pro installed on my computer, but it sometimes happens that the number of posts gets reset. But such things happened as well when I had no firewall. IMO, this results from some server problem.

I have had goofy things happen, probably because of Zone Alarm Pro- like my Google preferences go back to default. The thing is, I never had this problem with A2K until recently.

I"ve got zone alarm. Never thought about it's effect on things like that. But then I don't know enough about computers.

I do not think that Zone Alarm may have any effect on this. Zone alarm just prevents certain undesired Internet traffic. This has nothing to do with the counter reset.

Phoenix, there have been a few reboots lately. That may explain some of this.

Oh, this happens lots of times, Phoenix. I tend to blame the computer or isp since this has not happened to me on my 'at work' connection.

Just me?

Ok, this is both the sites fault and your ISPs fault but usually more isp than site.

The feature works like this:

As long as your session is valid the list remains.

Session dies, list dies.

Able 2 know will not kill your session unless:

The server is rebooted
The database engine fails
or you do not use cookies and do not use the site for 5 minutes (after 5 minutes of inactivity sessions die, inactivity means no clicking of links, it's not related to posting).


Your ISP an kill your session in a million ways. If you don't use cookies they can do this by rotating your IP. They can do this by disconnecting you from the net (this will kill yoyr session).

Where this site shares responsibility is that it's possible for those lists to never clear but there are big downsides in terms of performance.

That list is populated based on the date of posts vs the last date you visited. If your session dies and you return it's a new vist.

Now that list could work differently, it could use cookies for every single topic. For example, it could really be a list of every single topic that has a post that you have not seen. But that would require writing thousands of cookies on your machines and I am not willing to do that. Currently this site only has cookies to remember your name and password for you and I do not use cookies lightly.

Another way is to use the database to track this differently, but this can overwhelm the database. And because of the last solution I will not use this.

The last solution I posit is what I'll eventually use:

It will be a "all topics in one" list. It will not depend on your visits at all and will simply have all the topics with the ones wit the most recent posts at the top.

I currently have such a page but it was designed for bots and not for humans:

http://www.able2know.com/ataglance.php

That page is hard for humans to navigate and was not intended for them to use. I will make a better one soon.

/so in short I do not intend to change the way the "topics since last vist" works because it would need drastic changes to the way the site handles sessions and database connections or it would mean more database queries or cookies.

What I will do is create an alternative that might replace that feature alltogether.

Thanks Craven!

I've had "Resets" before, too, and I figure Craven's got that pretty well explained. As it happens to me on different machines, with and without ZoneAlarm, I favor ISP resets or site-based resets as the logical culprits.

It is inconvenient, however, to suddenly come uip "No posts since last visit" when tracking several threads at once ... but it ncan be lived with. I just look for the time of the last post in a thread when the "New Post" icons aren't working for me. Doesn't happen often, but it happens.



timber

timber,

You just reminded me about another issue involving spening to much time on a paginated search page. I'll explain later. It would confuse everyone if I didn't explain it right and I'm in a bit of a hurry.

The topic of this thread pertains to a problem I too have noticed with the boards except that I only see the counter reset to zero if I happen to edit a post. Other then that, it has yet to reset unless I initiated a disconnect from the site myself.

Also, the "Last 24 hrs" link returns nothing but an error for me. Something about it not being able to locate message IDs. The "Last 24 hrs" link would be a perfect solution for people who get prematurely disconnected or reset if it was operating properly. Any way to give it a kick in the pants to make it behave?

buttrfly, here's this from April 11