If I come into the site and go to a board, and then after reading some posts use the back button to get back to the main bulliten board list, all the "lightbulbs" turn "off" and I can't tell which boards have new posts since the lat time I came to the site...

Let me know if this isn't clear enough!

I had this problem for months and finally figured out bwhat was causing it a couple of weeks ago. I was using http://www.flyertalk.com/forumcgi/Ultimate.cgi as my shortcut to FlyerTalk. So after I was going into a forum and then hitting the back button to get to the main "boards" screen, the cgi was getting re-executed. I guess sometimes it loses track of what it has done and thinks it is starting a new session, because it resets as you and I have experienced.

The way to defeat it is as follows:

1. Use the same link you are using to get to FlyerTalk now. (May not necessarily be the one I gave above.)

2. Go into one of the forums (any one is OK).

3. After you're done browsing the threads in the forum, don't hit the back button to get to the main screen. Instead, click on the link that says Flyer Talk 6.0. It's at the top of the screen, right in the middle. If you look at the URL in your browser, you'll notice it's quite different from the link you originally used to get to the FlyerTalk boards. It should have the string "bypassCookie" in it.

Works every time for me, hope it does the trick for you.

dgolds, thanks for the tip. That's correct, the back button sometimes causes the cgi to re-execute. Stick to the navigation at the top right of the screen, which shows your current position in the FT directory structure.



[This message has been edited by dan at WebFlyer (edited 04-06-2001).]

The fastest way I've found to use FT is to actually open up a new window when you go into a forum. So I go to the front page and see a listing of the forums, and for each forum I want to go into I right click it and select "Open in New Window" ... then when I'm done reading that forum I close my new window and I've got the front page still up and can read my next forum.

Well that is certainly counter-intuitive to the rest of the web (if it is true). Normally 'back' will load from cache...whereas choosing a link will send a new request to the server...

Dorian

It's either a bug in UBB session management or possibly a very low session timeout setting, something like 5 minutes. (Dan, I don't know UBB, but it might be worth seeing if there is a setting and if there is, maybe tweaking it.) The cgi thinks it has a new session on its hands so it reloads all the forum settings for the user.

like beckles, i also open each forum in a new browser window. but i've recently switched to IE after using netscape for years ...and the few times i've used the back button, IE seems to load from the cache.

The approach that works for me is to open, not each forum, but to start with the first forum I care about and open each thread of interest in it in a new window. Then I send the main window off to get the next forum I follow as I go through the open threads, responding to or dismissing each one. When I'm down to just the main window, the index of the next forum is right there.

dgolds, thanks for the suggestion; we'll check it out.

I'll forward this on to Michael in case there's a similar setting in the new board he's working on.