Why are some posts in bold?

Godders wrote:

Heres my crack at understanding it:

1. What's bold and what is not bold (unread) is you specific. So everyone sees it differently. Your own threads will always appear to you as not bold (read) immediately after posting, because you've already read it! To everyone else, they will be bold.

2. When you look at a list of threads - the ones in bold are those you have not looked at which contain new posts, but it only includes the ones added too since you went offline!!!! So everything posted before the last time you went offline is considered "read" and therefore does not appear in bold. (this ties in with Tigermatts explanation about the cookie timing out)

So if the thread you are looking at had twenty unread items this morning, you didn't read them but then came back 10 hours later those ten would not be bold anymore. But the three threads that got posted on in the time since you went offline would be!

3. Just to confuse stuff a bit more after 15 minutes of inactivity the software considers you to have given up and left and automatically changes your status to "offline". Note that this can happen even if you leave the site open but inactive in a browser window (just tried it) so if this happens, even though you have had the site "open" all day, the system thinks you have gone offline 15 minutes after your last click and marks all the posts made before this time as "read" (just checked this too)

I'll shut up now before I make it sound even harder

Edited to add: All the "logout" button does is forces you to re-enter your Username / password again before you can post and it changes your status to offline immediately. If you have the "Remember Me" box ticked then all that happens is your browser logs you back in automatically, as far as the forum is concerned you went offline 15 minutes after your final click - and your browser adjusts whats read and unread accordingly