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lbuz



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Location: New York

PostPosted: April 21, 2004 6:34 PM    Post subject: Question regarding boards Reply with quote

I've noticed that if I hadn't read all the new messages that if I sign out I lose them as new and then I miss some of them, is there any way of keeping them "unread" until I can get to them? Thanks for the help
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kevin
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PostPosted: April 22, 2004 6:04 PM    Post subject: Reply with quote

i'm not sure it's possible to do that 100% reliably, Lisa. the software does its best to keep track of which posts you haven't read yet, but there are a lot of variables that might affect how well it actually does that.

the web runs on http (the hypertext transfer protocol; you've probably noticed that almost all web addresses start "http://" - this is what's known as the "protocol" portion of a URL - or Uniform Resource Locator), and http is a "stateless" protocol. what that means in practical terms is that web servers, by design, forget that you asked for a resource as soon as they serve it to you. so, if you go to a web page and click on the "refresh" button 100 times, the web server doesn't know (or care) that it was you clicking on the refresh button 100 times, it just knows that there were 100 separate requests for the same resource.

there have been a number of methods invented to get around that limitation; the most prevalent probably being "cookies". the software behind this site uses cookies for a number of things, one of which is maintaining state (or "remembering" where you've been and where you haven't). cookies are small plain-text files that are stored in your browser's cache and hold information that can only be read by the server that set the cookie.

the main problem with cookies as a state-maintenance device is that your browser will only maintain a limited number of cookies (generally, 20 per domain - or site - and no more than 300 total), and the cookies can't be any more than 4k in size. eventually, you run into those limits, and your browser does what it has to do to keep its cache within the limits. the end result is that some state information is lost.

the other problem with cookies is that they may not actually get set on your computer at all: many ISPs use what are called "proxy" servers to cut down on bandwidth usage. i won't go into a lot of detail about proxy servers; suffice it to say that a proxy server is (generally) a machine that sits between your machine and the web: when you request a resource (web page, image, etc.) by clicking a link or typing a URL in your browser's address bar (or however), the request is sent to the proxy, which then looks in its cache; if it finds the resoure you've just requested, it sends it back to you. if not, it sends a request to the server where that resource is hosted, fetches the resource, puts it in its cache, and sends it back to you (the idea being that, if a resource is in the proxy's cache, it doesn't have to use the bandwidth to go out to the web to fetch it). cookies are passed back and forth between client machines and servers as part of what are called the "headers" of a resource (such as a web page), and, if a proxy is in between your machine and the server where the cookie originates from, the cookie may get dropped on the proxy, instead of on your machine (which is usually ok during a session - in other words, as long as you don't log out)...

in the absence of a cookie, the browser reverts to its default behavior, which says that, if you've been to a page, you've been to everything on it. so, once you've opened a thread, even if you didn't read all of the responses to that thread, you've still been to the page, so the browser treats it as a visited page (i.e.; it "thinks" you've seen all there is to see there).

sorry if that was too much information, Lisa; i do tend to go on - i hope it at least made some sense...
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lbuz



Quit Date:
May 29, 2007

Posts: 254
Location: New York

PostPosted: April 23, 2004 6:56 AM    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks Kevin,

I have been having cookie issues lately that explains why. I appreciate you getting back to me. I am somewhat computer literate but geez you must be full of a lot of information. Laughing Laughing (just kidding)

Thanks
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kevin
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PostPosted: April 23, 2004 8:06 AM    Post subject: Reply with quote

yeah, i'm full of something, Lisa...

Wink
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