How to prevent marking posts read after long idle

[Ogmuk]

Sorry if this has been asked/posted before,

How does one turn off the feature 'period of time a user must remain inactive before any unread posts are marked read' and thus always keeping each unread post marked unread unless the user clicks on 'mark forum as read' or actually reads them... but, without affecting the cookie setting that controls 'how long an user will remain on Who's Online after their last activity'?

I wish they'd make this two separate options if possible.

[Bad Bunny]

This is of interest to me as well.

[Steve Machol]

This is directly related to the cookie timeout. The only way to change this is to increase this timeout.

[tubedogg]

There is no way to turn off the "feature" of a user's session expiring. It's not a feature, it's the way vB works. A user's session lasts for the cookie timeout period and after that all threads are marked read (actually they aren't, what really happens is the system just looks at a user's lastvisit date vs. the time of the post and if the post is newer it shows an unread icon).

[Ogmuk]

So if I understand correctly you can't you put the Cookie time-out on such a high number that they'd never time-out/mark read while keeping the Who's Online time-out on 900 seconds? Or do you mean not without changing the code?

[tubedogg]

The Who's Online timeout == the Cookie timeout, since that's how sessions are tracked.

You could theoretically modify the code to do per-thread per-user read marking but that was tested in vB3 and was found to cause way too much overhead.