There are a couple of things to discuss here.
First, currently all new threads or threads with new replies in them are at the top of each forum. While this does give easy access to new posts you still have to pass by the replies you have read already.
Next. Say we have an option that only shows new posts on a particular forum. You are going to be limited to 2 ways to display it. You can do it one way by listing the individual new posts like we do on the Recent Message listing or you can show the new posts in flat mode. Because you wouldn't be listing the replies in a thread you have already looked at you can't do a threading format because the thread logic would be gone without the early posts in the thread.
This new location of the new message marker isn't necessarily a new feature it's just possibly a better solution to the old way of doing it. So, at this point it wasn't meant to be a jumping point into a new design, etc. Just a small enhancement.
Sometimes, the amount of options that W3T has can limit some of the other things you can do. If, for example, we only had flat mode, then it would be pretty simple to only show new messages in a thread. Or if we didn't allow for users to choose the option of how many replies they want to show per page when viewing in flat mode, we could probably jump directly to the new posts.
What you are talking about is something that will be worked on in a future upgrade. The real plan would be to have an option for your favorite boards and then the "my w3t" page would be changed to utilize this. You would have links within your start page to show the new messages on your favorite forums. None of this has been really thought out on how it will exactly work, but it will come.
As for keeping the posts marked new until a user logs out of the board creates confusion. In my early versions of this program, about 1.3 or something I used to do that. But everyone complained because they couldn't tell if they had already read the thread or not when returning to the post listing.
I'm definitely open to making things easier for the end user, but like I said, sometimes we are limited on what type of things we can do because of all of the options in the program and the variety of display modes.
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Scream
WWWThreads Developer
