Please fill out the following sections to the best of your ability, it will help us investigate bugs if we have this information at the outset. Screenshots are especially helpful, so please provide those if you can.
Platform (Android, iOS, Website): iNatForum Website
App version number, if a mobile app issue (shown under Settings or About):
Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) : Safari (Mac) 14.1.2 (14611.3.10.1.5)
URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages:
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/computer-vision-performance-summary-data/25918/51
Screenshots of what you are seeing (instructions for taking a screenshot on computers and mobile devices: https://www.take-a-screenshot.org/):
Description of problem (please provide a set of steps we can use to replicate the issue, and make as many as you need.):
I try to keep track of what is “unread” in a given topic on iNatForum by glancing at the blue dots on each post, but I guess I don’t understand the dynamics of those dots. Sometimes they fade out as I read down through a set of posts, indicating I “read” the posts, but at other times the blue dots just seem to get stuck and don’t clear until/unless I leave the Forum topic (or the Forum altogether) and reload it. For the above-listed topic, blue dots would only clear after I had scrolled through all posts, closed iNatForum, and returned to the Forum and topic.
How are the blue dots supposed to function (and when)?
Hm, I haven’t been experiencing this - as long as I’ve scrolled all the way to the bottom of the topic, the blue dots fade, it will mark it as “read”, and won’t show up in the “Unread” section anymore. Anyone else?
I feel like it’s often wishy-washy about whether I’ve read something or not. Like I open a topic with one new post that is only 5 words and it takes me less than a second to read it and I hit back right away and it never marks as read. I’ll come back two hours later and think there’s another new post in the topic, but it’s just the same 5 word post from before, still marked unread. I can get it to clear by slowly scrolling down, but there’s definitely a lag. For comparison, if I open an email in gmail, regardless of how long I spend with it open, it gets marked read. So I think the forum software is just kind of clunky in its responsiveness. 
2 Likes
Mine seem to clear very rapidly when I’m viewing forum using Chrome. I often just scroll rapidly through a topic (if I’m not really interested) to clear the blue dot and I’ve never seen it linger.
The dots take a few seconds to clear. I believe the idea is that if you scroll to the bottom of a topic really fast you’re not really “reading” it. Sometimes if a post is only one line long I will read it and scroll down too fast for the Forum to register it as “read”. This is probably what’s happening to you in some form or another.
I’ve read through a post and sat there on it for minutes and the blue dots won’t fade. The only work-around is to leave the forum topic, come back, and scroll through them a second time. Then the blue buttons seem to fade properly. So something about the blue dots gets “stuck” on first read…sometimes. It’s quite inconsistent.
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It happened to me! I know what you mean now. And I remembered this topic so I took screenshots. The first, as you can see, was taken at 9:31 and the second at 9:32. In between I scrolled up and down the topic so that I couldn’t see those specific dots, then went back and they were still there. Interestingly, the first and second posts faded normally, it was only when I sat looking at the third that they froze.
