Today (not necessarily in the past) I am finding that the "View First Unread" link for a thread takes me to the first unread post on the current page, but if my first unread post is on an earlier page, the link takes me to the first link on the current page (not the first unread post in the thread).
Well... It still doesn't work properly for me. Over the last few days I've restarted the browser, rebooted, powered off and on again, and I've tried these steps on two different computers, but when I hit "view first unread" I still go to the first unread post on the last page of the thread. I haven't checked this in any browser other than Firefox (except for testing a website, why would I want to use any other browser than Firefox? ) -- perhaps this feature is now something that only works properly with MSIE.
Do you have a specific URL you are getting? (basically looking for the full URL with the "#post12345" part in it.
OK, I've tried to reconstruct what happens. (This meant that I needed to find some hot threads that I had not visited recently. ) Starting from the first page of a hot topic not previously read, when I click "view first unread" I get a link to the first post in the thread (which is on that same page) -- http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=85615#post906608 However, if I go from the forum to the last post in a hot topic (example: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=80355&page=2#post909165), then realize that there are many earlier posts I still need to read, when I click on "View first unread" it takes me to the top of that same page (in the example, this is http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=80355&page=2#post901414), although this is my first visit to the thread. Second example: I start at the last post in the topic (http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=80183&page=16#post911044), click on view first unread, and get to the top of that page (http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=80183&page=16#post910209), even though I have never previously visited the thread and there have been many posts since my last visit to digitalpoint forums. Thus, it appears that "View first unread" goes to the first post on the current page. And part of the problem is my habit of going to the last posts of threads I am interested in...
I think that's the underlying problem. Once you visit any page in a thread (for example the last page), the last post on that page becomes the last read post. So anything unread starts after that post. If you visit the last page first, you essentially forfeit the ability to go back and find "truly" unread posts.