I don't know what funky setup or board theme you're using, but that's not how it works. You go to the subforum, click mark forums read, it doesn't affect the parent forum at all. Those new posts will still be shown as unread. Even if you're in the parent forum it's two seperate links; clicking mark forums read for the parent forum won't affect the subforum, and vice-versa if you use the link for the subforum in the parent forum. I do it all the time without problem.Destructionator XIII wrote:You see a new post indicated in the Senate. You assume it is in the HoC, so you skip to it. You scroll down and see a few new posts. You read the interesting ones, then hit mark forums read to clear out the uninteresting ones. Meanwhile, there actually was a new post in the Senate, and you missed it entirely.
In the end, I really don't think it's worth the fuss people are making. Yes, a post in a subforum can give a "false positive" but with phpBB3 it's fairly easy to deal with. You see the unread posts indicator, you go to the parent forum (since you don't for whatever reason care about the subforum) scroll down, see no new posts, you can click on a link to mark the subforum as read right in the parent forum. If you're interested in the subforum, you just head there.
In the end, it's down to whether the minor inconvenience of the above outweighs having even more parent forums displayed on the main page than we do now. Which, as mentioned, is already a bit and there are plenty who would rather not see it grow and have to do even more scrolling than they do now (take in to consideration those of us in usergroups or who otherwise see nonpublic forums) since we don't all have high resolution, super widescreen HD monitors and whatnot.
So your solution to your particular brand of inconvenience is to introduce a whole new inconvenience to a new subset of people? Unless there is more to your arguments than "I don't like it" but I, to be honest, haven't seen that yet.
