Yes, that's true. That's the one weakness. Hopefully you don't encounter that situation too often. I know I run into it occasionally, and have to edit the URL. For example, when I read your node above, I was on .com, where I'm logged in as erzuuli; I hit 'Reply'; then decided I wanted to reply as me, so I edited the URL. But that situation is generally pretty easy to avoid, for the most part.

A follow-up to this part of "Re^5: Dark Mode for AM?".

Re Newest Nodes and Recently Active Threads, I'm not going to stay away for a few days just to test that. :-) However, I will try to remember to monitor the situation when that next happens and report back.

It turns out that, due to unforeseen circumstances, "when that next happens" occurred just a few days later. I kept some notes. For reference, my current timezone is "AEDT - Australian Eastern Daylight Savings Time" (UTC+11:00).

1. I used my bookmarked link https://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=861371. This put me on kcott's home node as AM (i.e. not logged in). It showed: "Last here: Oct 23, 2023 at 20:48 UTC (2 days ago)".
2. I logged in. This put me on kcott's home node as kcott (i.e. logged in). It showed: "Last here: Oct 26, 2023 at 17:49 AEDT (0 seconds ago)".
3. I immediately went to Newest Nodes. This showed: "Show nodes created within the past [1 v] days [Submit]" (that's a dropdown list and a submit button).
4. I next went to Recently Active Threads. This showed: "Showing nodes created within the past [1 v] days" (that's a dropdown list).

It's actually fairly rare for me to not log in for over 24 hours. Making manual adjustments, when that does happen, is minimal effort and doesn't bother me.

— Ken

I immediately went to Newest Nodes. This showed: "Show nodes created within the past [1 v] days [Submit]" (that's a dropdown list and a submit button).

I use Newest Nodes on a daily basis. The only time I see that message is when I click Clear my 'last checked' time, so it doesn't have a cutoff time logged in the database for me. {edit}: When there are no more new posts When I've read all the posts that were listed"{/edit} in Newest Nodes for me, I click I've checked all these, which logs my 'last checked' time, so that Newest Nodes knows how far to go back next time. Then, when there's a new post and I load Newest Nodes, it just shows me the ones since I last clicked that button.

I am guessing that you've never clicked I've checked all these, so you've never saved your 'last checked' timestamp, so the server has no way of knowing how far back you want to read. If you start clicking that once you're done with the current Newest Nodes list, I think you'll find that it works as expected.

The I've checked all these button only shows up if I have unread posts. The Clear my 'last checked' time button only shows up if I have no unread posts. The "Show nodes created within the past [1 v] days [Submit]" paragraph only shows up if I've cleared my 'last checked' time, or on the rare occasion when I haven't read for more than a few days.

You can, of course, change the "1 days" to something larger. And like pryrt said, this functionality works best if you click the "I've checked all these" at the end of each "catch-up session".

btw - I didn't like the fact that the menu didn't let you select a number of days greater than 3, so I changed that to 7. If you want to go back further in time, try using the "<<<" buttons at the top of the page.

Today's latest and greatest software contains tomorrow's zero day exploits.