This is what I usually do, and I did it here. The problem is that 4 pages of "new posts" that I had yet to review disappeared...apparently treated at old posts at that point. I was not able to recover them, so I quit TUG's user group...to wait for another day. But is this the way it's supposed to work? If so, why?
I hardly ever use New Posts, so I've had to dig into this a bit.
The New Posts function is run via the bbs' internal search capabilities. What follows applies to searches in general, not just New Posts searches.
Your search criteria are saved under a unique search id number. The search results page is called by a URL containing this search id number, like so:
[noparse]http://www.tugbbs.com/forums/search.php?searchid=#######[/noparse]
Once you've downloaded such a results page, as long as you keep it in its own window or tab, it won't change.
If the search results cover more than one page, the URL for additional pages will still reference this search id number, like so:
[noparse]http://www.tugbbs.com/forums/search.php?searchid=#######&pp=40&page=2[/noparse]
The pp=40 means there are 40 results displayed per page, and page=2 is which page of the results to display.
The search id number is retained for one hour. When the hour is up, information regarding this search id is dropped from the server's memory, so clicking on a page link that references that search id number will now fail.
So if you originally had 6 pages of results, but lost 4 of them, you must have still been on the second page of results when your hour ran out.
The one hour period is hard coded into the bbs software and they provide no interface for changing it. The number of results per page IS settable, however, so I've now increased it from 40 to 100, which should ease the problem somewhat.
To completely get around the problem, all I can see to do when you have a large number of results, is:
- FIRST load EACH page of results into its own tab or window, as once you've grabbed them you've got them.
- THEN bring up each result you wish to read in its own tab or window as discussed previously.