trouble shooting - read/not read in a forum

[yan242]

Hi, a trouble shooting here : can't see when a post on that forum is read or not read when i'm using PM or even Firefox.
When you've read a post on that forum, a little pic must appear in the left column. Nothing appears now since 3 weeks ago.
Yan242

[therube]

URL ? (Just note it as NSFW.)

Are you logged in?

Are you blocking, ad blocker or otherwise?

Similar forum, but it (always) displays "envelope" icons to the left of the thread title.
https:// vipergirls.to/forums/303-Artistic-Photo-Sets/page18?prefixid=Met-Art_com&sort=title&order=asc

[River Moon]

I see this sort of thing happen on many forums. Some forums add an identifier to the URL links. This forum does the same...

https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=32293&sid=93e4c3b6272802e1497cd3f7195ccde4

The below code snippet removes the 'sid' parameter and restores the URL link to something that never changes.

Code: Select all

(function()
{
	var eli = document.getElementsByTagName("a");
	for(var i = 0, li = eli.length; i < li; i++)
	{
		if (eli[i].href)
		{
			var href = new URL(eli[i].href);
			href.searchParams.delete('sid');
			eli[i].href = href;
		}
	}
})();

...different forums use a different parameter name!

I think the, in this case, sid parameter is some kind of tracking id. It gets preserved in the site's cookie and reused on subsequent visits. If, like me, you delete cookies on browser exit this causes a new id to be constantly generated which breaks the links visited relationship.

Cookie
Name: FreeTheLizard2_sid
Content: 93e4c3b6272802e1497cd3f7195ccde4
Domain: .forum.palemoon.org

[Moonchild]

sid is the "session ID". A unique identifier for your current browsing session. This is used by the forum software to keep track of unique visits.

Depending on how fora are configured, the "read/unread" status can be tracked for guests or not (logged in or not). tracking read state for all posts on the forum for guests is fairly computationally expensive so it is usually recommended that on busy fora or fora with large numbers of posts, this is disabled. So, it's very possible that this change a few weeks ago was on purpose by the forum admins, and has nothing to do with the browser in that case. As pointed out as well: if you prevent a browser from storing the session ID in a cookie, it will also not know to tie your visit to a previous session, and thus not know the read/unread state.