They will stay gray UNTIL another post is made. For example, this one will turn black again so now you will know a new post has been made. As long as it remains gray, no new posts have been made. It's a sign that you should read it again!

I know. Read what I said again.

I've seen that too, BillyBoy. Not always, though. I believe it mostly happens overnight (or what we call overnight over here).
Tor

It's happened to me too. Rarely, but yeah.

M

They remain grey as long as the URL to the thread is unchanged and remains in your browser's history up to the history expiration date. I believe the default expiration in both Netscape and MSIE is 9 days, which is usually long enough for most people's browsing purposes. SonicFoundry changes the URL when a new post is added which is what causes the link to go black when new posts have been added that you haven't read yet. The "already read" status is not stored on SonicFoundry's server, but is an interaction between the forum software's URL strategy and your browser's history.

So much for how it's supposed to work.

Anything that alters or purges your browser's history file will also cause the links to go black. If you clear history or internet temporary files you'll see this happen. Some optimization software will automatically do this for you without informing you it's happened. Several worms and viruses also do this to help cover their tracks. The browser itself may clear out history if it fills up too fast. There are settings in both MSIE and Netscape for Kbyte limits of disk space to be used for history and cache, and the expiration time can also be changed. MSIE has also been known in the past to have some bugs in both it's history and cache storage, though i was under the impression that these bugs were fixed starting with version 5.

Changes back to black at midnight here...

futz, have you recently installed anything new on your computer or changed any of the internet settings? Previously read posts still remain grey on my screen for the full 9 days that Netscape retains history.

This Forum ... well it does things. I've been complaining before about it suddenly introducing Javasript errors that are then reported by my browser. I've simply concluded that there are non-standard Javascript elements in these pages and that's that. No one at SoFo has been willing to comment or do something about it. If it was a less important forum I'd stay away from it, like I do at COW - there are some heavy Javascript errors there, and no one replies to the mails I've sent them about it. Well, good bye Cow.

Tor

Definitely something amiss here; not quite sure what at the moment.