WAD "Mark Forums Read" fails

[Steve Fabian]

If there are messages later than the last time the forum view was refreshed, "Mark Forums Read" either will not permit the "Mark All Forums Read" action, or it will appear to have been successful, but in either event the new messages will not be marked as "read". This prevents ignoring messages one read via the email interface.

 

[rconn]

WAD (and it's XenForo, not Take Command, so it doesn't really belong in this forum).

IMO it would be an incredibly bad idea to blindly mark messages you haven't even seen as "read".

 

[Steve Fabian]

WAD (and it's XenForo, not Take Command, so it doesn't really belong in this forum).

IMO it would be an incredibly bad idea to blindly mark messages you haven't even seen as "read".

I disagree on both counts.

This forum is a key part of JPsoft support, and JPsoft pays its vendor for its use. If the forum would cause harm (even though I don't see how that could happen), century-old legal tradition would make JPsoft liable. Besides, as a paying customer, you have clout to force your vendor to make changes. As a third party to the transaction, your users have no legal standing to ask your vendor to do anything.

First, there is sufficient safeguard in the two-step (and sometimes 3-step) procedure to safeguard against accidental mismarking. The additional, slow steps required in the situation discussed are further irritant against using a GUI-based system for text access. But most significant is that messages marked "already read" are not deleted from the forum, the user who does not want to even hear about them today can go back next year and actually read (more likely, reread) them. We regularly reread messages in earlier parts of a thread before answering a later one (or at least we ought to do that to stay on topic without duplication).

 

[rconn]

Besides, as a paying customer, you have clout to force your vendor to make changes.

That's -- highly fanciful. (How are you doing at forcing Microsoft to make changes to Windows?) And since Windows is a key part of Take Command's usage, is JP Software now liable for legal damages if Windows crashes?

You reported a "bug", but you're actually requesting a feature change to a third-party application requiring that I somehow force XenForo to change their (WAD) behavior to do something that I (and obviously they as well) consider to be undesirable. I'm going to have to decline doing that for now.

You can submit it to the feedback forum; if you get a few dozen other users supporting the change I'll consider (against my better judgement) passing it on to XenForo.

 

[rconn]

The other critical factor you're overlooking here is that the email notification is not part of XenForo; it's a kludge that I added to the JP Software forums for the benefit of a tiny (albeit incredibly noisy) fraction of the user community. XenForo is unlikely to be interested in modifying their software for the potential benefit of one user on one forum at the cost of substantial potential problems for every other user on every other forum.

If you consider this a major problem, I would be happy (even ecstatic!) to remove email notifications altogether.