New topics via cookie?

[jsteele]

If you come to the forums without logging in, as you guessed, there is no way for the system to know when you were last here because the system doesn't know who you are. Therefore, you will have no indication of new messages (however, the "recent topics" list still works).

If you arrive in the forums without logging in, you get a session cookie. If you then go to the home page and login, and then return to the forums, the forums will still use your old session cookie which is associated with an anonymous session. So, still no new topics. However, I've found that a simple "refresh" or "reload" (depending on your terminology) fixes this and the new topics immediately appear.

As far as I know, none of the cookies are IP-based as that would seriously hose up AOL users (who come from multiple cache servers).