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Not an old bastard.
I'm keen to hear about how people use things, which ways of working don't work with what we've described.
But you have supplied an impossible situation.
Multiple devices means we cannot use cookies or save information at your end to indicate where the to which you've read up to.
But not being signed in means we cannot save information at our end to indicate where you've read up to (we can't tell you apart from anyone and everyone).
I'd consider changing the default behaviour to be last post rather than first... but the numbers are too heavily against you. Of people who are not signed in, a massive majority are first time visitors. People absolutely brand new to the site do want context and information that is on page 1 of almost every conversation/event.
So I hear you and wish I could help... but I can't pick you out from the mass of new visitors when you're not signed in, and I can't save info about where you've read up to in any way that will be useful to.
The only way to do multi-device "read up to here", is for me to be able to say "This is blue_fleet, the last time he viewed Subtle bugs was 8 minutes ago". But without that context at the beginning, all I'm able to know is "The last time someone viewed Subtle bugs was 8 minutes ago".
vBulletin and other products play tricks and try to do this with cookies. Which worked fairly well when the majority of access was desktop and we used few devices. But it doesn't work well any more, the multi-device world is here... the only reliable way to implement /newest/ without showing you things you've read, or skipping massive chunks of things you've haven't read but would want to... is for you to sign in.
There's no financial benefit or incentive to us for having you signed in, in fact the only difference being signed in makes is that we do 2 things for each page:
- Who is this person (and where have they read up to)
- On this page (or item), they read up to point x
On #2, we don't even record when you read old stuff. If what you're reading is older than where you've read to there's nothing for us to do. All we're doing is shuffling a time-based bookmark a little further through an item. We're not logging your every action, we're just making the site work better (by not sending you back to the first page).
- Who is this person (and where have they read up to)
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Velocio
Having to sign in when I have nothing to say sounds a bit pointless. And logging in does'nt make it seemless either. As I just logged in I've just done a few visits to regularly visited threads and though it did'nt take me to the first page, it took me pages that I'd since read well past whilst browsing without being logged in, so thats not really been a solution either. So for members it seems you are best off browsing while being logged in or not at all, which seems a bit meh.
I may be old school but I don't like being kept signed into things for long periods, why should I be? Is there a reason other than to show us as visiting traffic?
I'd say a large numbers of threads like 'in the news', 'football' and many others would be pointless going to page 1, in fact most threads with lots of pages. Any new visitors to the site can get the context as it relates to here and now, not context 7-8 years ago when Man Utd were good and Scoble ran 12 inches of spacers on every bike. If they want to go
further to see how deep the rabbit warren really goes (yes the matrix was on the tellybox again yesterday) they can click to the 1st page and trawl away. Even if we had the 1st page/last page option to go to on the list of threads,like we did on the old forum, that would improve the user experience, no?
I think I'm just an old bastard who shuns a lot of the new features, I don't really need or want to have notifications of replies to anything I've said, if I want to go back I can. I don't have a desire to be followed or to follow. Even seeing the old 'trending' button gave me have a bit of a funny turn. The new quotes thing its lots easier though so hurrah for that.
And yes I along with lots of others do browse from various devices from various locations so I can't see the cookie thing working consistently either.
Anyway sorry that sounds like me whining away, you're obviously very busy trying tweaking it all, just my 2p worth. Congratulations on the work done so far, and on the wedding news.