"This sort of erratic behavior is not new but I don't see that anybody has commented on it. Maybe it's just another gremlin in the software."
First, it's been commented on many times.
Second, there is an issue where a post is edited and it will show as unread but the main top entry won't note it.
Sorry, but it's broken and there's no real reason to fix it.
Bob
The Mark All as Read has never worked very well but it has sortof worked ... at least when the link appears.
This morning I see that there are new posts since my last visit to Speakeasy, but there is no 'Mark All as Read' link in the upper right where I'm used to seeing it.
When I first came over to the feedback forum this morning the link was also missing in both FF 1.5 and IE 6 even though there are a LOT of posts I've never seen before. Later the link did appear in 'Forum Feedback' but not in Speakeasy. A few minutes ago the link returned in Speakeasy even though there was no apparent new post since I first visited the forum a little while ago.
This sort of erratic behavior is not new but I don't see that anybody has commented on it. Maybe it's just another gremlin in the software.
BTW:
When I said that 'Mark all as read' does not work well, I'm still remembering our old software, pre-Jive. In that system, if I looked at the forum at (for example) 08:55 and later clicked the link to mark everything read, the software only marked posts created before 08:55. With the current software if I look at a forum at 08:55 and then click the 'mark all as read' at (for example) 09:00 the software marks all posts as read, including those made between 08:55 and 09:00. It isn't a huge big deal, but the behavior of the old software was more useful than the behavior of the 'new' software.
The other idiosyncrasy of the current software is that if I 'mark all as read' the resulting page uses a URL like: forums.cnet.com/7705 ... instead of a URL like forums.cnet.com/5204 .... to display the results. Consequently, if I 'mark all as read' at 08:55 and then return at 10:30 and refresh the page I will accidentally 'mark all as read' again. It's a bit annoying.
These annoying behaviors are not new. I believe I've reported them before. It would be nice if they could be fixed.

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