Hi David,
This only worked automatically in and with each of the single posts. It has never worked automatically with the view entire thread at once mechanism.
When we added the ability to view the entire thread at once, we had to add a link — Curtis wrote the functionality first, and Eric later rewrote it when he changed the mechanism to a new system == that allowed users to “mark as read” the threads.
This happened as there is simply no easy way to mark a thread as read and also allow for new posts to occur within a thread and have those posts remain marked unread, and therefore apparent to a reader that new posts have been added to a thread.
Therefore, the mechanism can’t just mark a thread — if it does so, then new posts added to the thread will also show as having been read.
You can only mark a “state” of a thread at a given time and — within our system as it has been up to now — that requires the user to mark the thread as read (which then marks the state of the thread at that given time, allowing new posts to occur and have them showing as freshly added to a user).
Abraham has been exploring new ideas and methods as to how to accomplish things in the COW, and perhaps he will find a new way of doing it that works. But please keep in mind that neither Curtis nor Eric could find a way of doing it that didn’t require tracking each and every thing that a user does and maintaining that information in a database — which we don’t want to do.
But who knows, the future is not written in stone, is it?
Best regards,
Ron Lindeboom