FAQ: "New Posts" icons won't go away! What to do?

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FAQ: "New Posts" icons won't go away! What to do?

Post by rjlittlefield »

Avid readers of the forum sometimes encounter a problem that the "New Posts"icons Image won't go away even after the topic with "new posts" has been read. Sometimes the problem occurs for some topics and not for others. Once it occurs at all it tends to occur a lot, and it may keep occurring for a long period of time (days, perhaps) before spontaneously going away.

Being on the forum so much, I've run into this problem quite a bit. Finally I got frustrated enough to dig down and see what's going on.

It turns out that the forum software keeps track of when each member has read each topic by placing a long and complicated cookie on each member's computer. Well, there's a maximum length for cookies, and that length corresponds to about 150 topics. When the maximum length is reached, suddenly the forum becomes unable to keep track of newly viewed topics for that member. The problem persists until the cookie expires or gets removed.

Therein lie the workarounds -- either force the cookie to expire or just remove it manually.

In theory, the cookie expires "at end of session", so you may be able to get rid of it by just logging off the forum and exiting your browser. I say "in theory" and "may" because I haven't carefully re-tested that method, though I could swear I've tried that before and the problem persisted.

But it definitely does work to just remove the thing manually. The cookie's name is "photomac_phpbb_t", coming from domain .photomacrography.net and path /forum. In FireFox, it can be accessed via Tools > Options > Privacy > Show Cookies. Navigate to find and select it, then hit the Remove Cookie button.

--Rik

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