I haven't tried anything further than this thread. If no one cares how buggy the forum is, who am I to complain. I'm simply notifying my issues.
Hello, we do care about forum bugs. Minor changes have been made recently, but should not effect the Mark Forums Read feature. Recently, plans have been in the works for a flight to Seattle to visit Redmond mid-month, and also to attend the launch party for Microsoft Windows Surface Pro in Manhattan in a few days.
We are expecting to implement a major upgrade (the largest in years) of our forum software soon, that will change the way the site operates in a number of effective ways. Some of the latest changes we have made recently involve security-related updates to prevent spam.
As for mark forums read, we have seen this before. Please report: Are you trying to mark all forums read or simply a single forum?
If you are unable to mark all forums read using the link on the homepage, please use the drop-down link from the menu system under "Forum Actions". You want to make sure it continues to maintain a valid security hash for marking the forums read, as we use database forum marking for this purpose (i.e. the threads you read are tracked by the database and not by a cookie system or other mechanism).
Some changes were made, and I even logged into your account to see if this information is missing.
forumdisplay.php as a standalone page is not part of our website that people are expected to access whatsoever. There are parameters assigned to this URL to make this function work that require additional security.
However, if all forums have been marked read and no new posts have been made, it is possible that you may encounter this issue. If you are simply clicking the link over and over, for example, while all of the data has been marked read, you are accomplishing nothing, as there is no data to mark read. This may be one reason why you are experiencing the issue.
You may also want to try clearing your browser cache, including cookies to this site, to ensure that no required information has become outdated or malformed through the use of other forum sites. We are using the latest code available, and initiated a clean-up mechanism that should further improve page rendering.
The browser you are using may also have something to do with it. Have you tried it outside Opera? Usually when problems like this take place, our members are nice enough to report it as a bug using the "Contact Us" feature, instead of accusing us of not caring how buggy the forum is. I am on the pre-release team and in the special thanks credits for the vBulletin software in general, and have made hundreds of modifications to this site to improve feature availability. Thousands of dollars worth of fees are spent for global CDN distribution of scripts and files to multiple server farms all over the world. You can access this entire website, through our API, ad-free on Facebook, or use a mobile app on nearly any platform to use this website.
We are dealing with a database that is over 2GB in size, so not every issue can be addressed right away. Still, I have answered your call for help, while you are using a browser that has about 1% of the Internet using it. You can check this on StatCounter, W3Counter, NetApplications, and Clicky. It is possible more people are still using Netscape. If you want help diagnosing the problem, you need to report it as a bug.
After 6 years of doing this, that comment is really something else. Try using a mainstream browser and seeing if you encounter a similar issue. We are not hiring developers to re-write this site, we are trying to participate in the way this site will appear in its next incarnation directly with the developers who have made the software possible to hundreds of thousands of websites. We have identified critical issues in the past, with user participation, but not with insults.
So try a real browser and tell us if you still encounter the problem. Opera may not have the capability of rendering security hashes based on JavaScript implanted on the bottom of a page when it already pre-renders the top of the page. This was a common issue with older, less used browsers. Thanks