Posts marked as read... Fixed?

Corporal Joined: Aug 16, 2003 Posts: 52

I just decided to bring this up in a seperate topic than the sticky one, so I could figure some things out and not interfere with that.

Alright, so for his cookie suggestions. He said to leave the cookie settings blank. This would essentially render it unable to set a cookie, right? So that's what I tried, however, the second you chose a forum, all topics in BBtoNuke would immediately be marked as READ. This was because it was unable to find the user's current SID in the db, meaning it had to make a new one with the CURRENT time. That means any posts older than current time (all) would be marked as read.
It could not find that SID because there was no cookie to get the SID from. This is also why you have SID in the URL, because it needs to make a new one every visit to your forums.

Now, I've gone through some of the php scripts, and come up with some things. It turns out that the (read post) _t cookie was being deleted every time you exited the browser, because it's expiration was set to 0. The same went for the _sid cookie, which held your session id. Now, all I had to do was change the 0 to $current_time + 604800 (one week). This would mean that every week, all posts would be marked as read, instead of every visit to the site.

There are a few instances of this in includes/sessions.php:

Code:

setcookie($cookiename . '_sid', $session_id, 0, $cookiepath, $cookiedomain, $cookiesecure);

Code:

setcookie($cookiename . '_sid', $session_id, $current_time + 604800, $cookiepath, $cookiedomain, $cookiesecure);

This also had to be changed:

Code:

$last_visit = ( $userdata['user_session_time'] > 0 ) ? $userdata['user_session_time'] : $current_time;

Code:

$last_visit = ( $userdata['user_session_time'] > $current_time ) ? $userdata['user_session_time'] : $current_time;

Then, in your modules/Forums/viewtopic.php, you have this:

Code:

($board_config['cookie_name'] . '_t', serialize($tracking_topics), 0, $board_config['cookie_path'], $board_config['cookie_domain'], $board_config['cookie_secure']);

That means that every time you exit the browser, it will delete the read topics cookie. However, if you replace it with this:

Code:

($board_config['cookie_name'] . '_t', serialize($tracking_topics), $current_time + 604800, $board_config['cookie_path'], $board_config['cookie_domain'], $board_config['cookie_secure']);

The browser will save the cookie for a week, every time a user views a new topic, it will be updated for a week from that time as well. This means instead of ALL topics being marked as read, or even all that are older, it will only mark the ones you have ACTUALLY READ.

In modules/Forums/viewforum.php:

Code:

setcookie($board_config['cookie_name'] . '_f', serialize($tracking_forums), 0, $board_config['cookie_path'], $board_config['cookie_domain'], $board_config['cookie_secure']);

This cookie has the same problem as the _t one.

Code:

setcookie($board_config['cookie_name'] . '_f', serialize($tracking_forums), $current_time + 604800, $board_config['cookie_path'], $board_config['cookie_domain'], $board_config['cookie_secure']);

As for cookie settings, do not set them all empty. It should be as follows:
Cookie domain *BLANK*
Cookie name anything_you_want
Cookie path /
Cookie secure
If your server is running via SSL, set this to enabled, else leave as disabled Disabled Enabled *DISABLED*
Session length [ seconds ] 3600

Leaving the domain blank means that from any subdomain that the user accesses your website from it will use the same cookie. Instead of a different one for www.website.com and http://website.com - Only set it to something if your domain has more than one site on it, in subdomains. In that case, it would be set to subdomain.website.com

Apart from those settings, I changed and added some bits here and there, so I'm not too sure if they changed anything, which is why I didn't post them here. I'm no PHP professional, but I think this would work.
Also, I'm not too sure how big the site_t cookie would get after having viewed 500 topics or so... But if a user logs out, the _t cookie SHOULD be erased, and their session id's user_lastvisit would be set to the current time, so all posts older than when they log in would be marked as read.

This fix also makes the "Mark all as read" link work.

Does anyone have anything extra to add to this? Because I'm really not too sure about everything I've done.

Nuke Cadet Joined: Jul 01, 2004 Posts: 4

Ok but ...

1st - You need fix this topic because the 1st method that leave the cookie settings blanked dont work in PhpNuke 7.3 patched.

2th - Why you dont make new bbtonuke version with this corrections ?

3th - There are possibilities to resolve this bug forever ?

Posted: Sun Nov 21, 2004 4:13 am

Just wanted to bump this up to see if more people had succes with this fix?
I tried the sticky fix as well, but ended up with same results as stated above.

Posted: Fri Jun 03, 2005 5:25 am

I'm having this issue as well...all posts being marked as read as soon as you leave the main forums page.

Nuke Soldier Joined: Feb 05, 2005 Posts: 32

Ok the fix seems to stop it from marking all read by itself. The problem still exsist but now marking all forums as read just keeps the unread flag. and marking all topics as read is now blank.

Logging out and back in does mark all forums read though. It just seems that the button to press to mark it as read doesnt work.