Re: Forum Problems
- Posted by mattlewis (admin) Sep 29, 2010
- 1294 views
It's likely I'm not understanding, but it doesn't seem to me that any kind of any such "statistical data collection" would in any way be necessary; I would think the (previously) working "star" system could simply be expanded, no?
It already "knows" IF a thread has posts in it that "YOU" haven't yet looked at, so all it would have to add is the ability to "know" WHICH was the LAST post in such a thread which WAS read. Then it would/could jump to the NEXT post after that in that thread when you click on the thread title.
So a relevant question might be: exactly HOW does the (previously) working "star" system work?
It's actually done by your browser. The links have styling that puts an image there (the star) if the link isn't in your history, and leaves it off if the link is in your history. This sort of thing can allow a webpage to know if you've been to certain links or not.
Suppose that instead of a generic image, the website encoded the image url so that it knew what the link was. Then, the website could effectively look into your browsing history. On this forum, it was just used as an easy way to show unread posts. All of the links are styled to be colored orange.
Browser makers are treating this ability as a breach of privacy, and making it so that the available styling doesn't do anything that the server would notice. To get around this, we'd have to add a whole lot of tracking to the euweb code and database, which probably isn't going to happen.
I've reverted the stylesheet, so the stars should be back.
Matt
