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What I do, however, sometimes do is read individual boards and then 'read all' from favorite boards. Shouldn't a read flag be a read flag no matter where I am?

That's what I meant. The two options don't work well together. If you read individual boards, you'll want to push through each board one at a time until you've caught up with all new posts.

I agree it's not intuitive, but I fear the alternative might be even more confusing for people. Right now, if you click the "read all" button, you'll see a list of messages starting with the oldest new message and it'll include all messages after that from your favorite boards. (You can do this now if you want!) Now click the refresh button. What would you expect to happen? I'd expect to see those exact same messages showing up.

The problem with using a literal interpretation of "read all new messages" is apparent if you consider what happens if it did exactly that. You click "read all", and you'll see a list of messages starting with the oldest new message and it'll include all NEW messages after that from your favorite boards. Now click the refresh button. What would you expect to happen? I'd expect to see those exact same messages showing up, but that's not what happens. After all, those messages you just viewed are now considered old! If you try to refresh the page, it'll actually show you the NEXT page of new messages since that's where the "new" messages now start.

Okay, I know some of you are thinking, "Yeah, but I don't refresh my messages, so it won't affect me." What if you had more than 50 new messages. Not all the new messages will fit onto a single page--some of them will be on the "next" page. The thing is, if you click that next page button, it'll actually SKIP the next 50 new messages which is actually the messages you are expecting to read.

It's not as simple as you might think. I can change it so it'll only list new messages--I'm not particularly attached to implementing one method over another--but I fear you won't like the consequences as much as you think you might. I'd like to work out a solution that won't cause additional problems, but it's not an easy project.

As it is now, if you either read messages from individual boards or all the boards at once--one or the other--there's no confusion at all. It only causes problem if you try to use both options at once.

-- Ryan

Alrighty, Ryan. I thought it must be a bug (and frankly, it still sounds like one :) ) but now that you say it isn't, I'll hush. What's that they call known bugs? FEATURES!

Happily working through 577 posts,
Ish