IndyGerdener wrote:It seems like before the update it would log me out when I left the page. When I came back it would automatically log me back in and therefore reset the new posts since my last visit. There are alot of posts now that the season is coming in full swing and new users are asking same questions over and over. I guess I will just mark everything as read and go about it that way. As the season goes on I am sure it will slow down and I will be able to keep up again!!
To address your points in reverse order:
1) The
posts per day, if I remember the past few years correctly, peak in July. Many people seem to go on vacation in August, so the incredible number of posts per day diminishes somewhat that month. There's a resurgence in September (what I think of as "the last gasp before early northern frosts"), then quite a few posts in October (southern gardens which freeze are now trying to beat the frost), but traffic on the forum doesn't *really* quiet down until just after...
Thanksgiving.
Forum traffic started ramping up again pretty early this year, certainly sooner than usual. I missed all of January due to work, but February was busier than I remember it being the last couple of years; maybe due to warmer weather in some parts of the country? (Destroyed, of course, by later storms.)
March was about average, probably due to those late storms, but April has just about taken the cake for exponential growth in posts per day (I considered, then discarded, metaphors like "April has just been snowed with posts" and "April has seen a blizzard of posts" in consideration of the true snow and blizzards across much of the United States the past two or so weeks).
The take-home message here is that dedicated forum followers may want to re-organize how/when they read the Forum.

Perhaps daylight hours are too scarce, and need to be used in the garden itself, so catching up at THG might be reserved for when the Sun isn't available?

And, of course, if one has a full-time job, that needs to be factored in!
2)
Being logged out by the Forum /
Threads being marked as having been read: I think that the Forum software now grants us a longer "inactive" period before ditching us.

I'm sometimes interrupted by a dog needing to go outside, "kitty politics" (I have three cats), laundry needing to be moved from washer to dryer, or other household tasks. Previously, I'd attend to them, come back, and--Aieee! I'd been logged out.

That meant I'd have to go through each forum/sub-forum and look at the time of the most recent post...etc. etc. etc.

Yuck.
The current system, though, where the title of
each and every thread I've even looked at--not
posted on, just
opened to read--since the update has turned
orange and will evidently stay that way from now until Domesday (history reference; yes, it's the correct spelling), makes me crazy. It gives me no guidance a'tall; 90 to 95% of the posts are
orange, making the system pretty much worthless to me. At least under the former régime, I could find my place in the list of New Posts by seeing which ones were bolded/unbolded.
I'm not sure how I would use a "Not Read" system, unless it worked like the previous system did.
Is that what everyone on this thread is talking about?
Cynthia H.
Sunset Zone 17, USDA Zone 9