It is not exactly the same.
Forum bookmarking is for a full Thread.
Mark as unread is for a specific Message inside a thread.
Bookmarking can be implemented for a single thread or a single message in a thread or - gasp - both. The feature does not exist yet, no need to consider the specification somehow limited or even fixed.
Anyway, the way the unread messages in a thread are currently handled presents an implementation problem for a "mark message as unread" feature: Only the information about one point in the thread seems to stored. This means that all messages after an unread message are considered as unread. However, it is not the first unread message in a thread that is stored, rather the last read message. You can see this by following a link to a thread, say to message number 50, you have previously not read. After you have done so, also messages 1-49 are considered read even though you never loaded them. Of course, I don't know exactly how this is implemented, but it is pretty easy to deduct this based on thread behaviour while using forums.
Relating to your opinion that this would be "very simple", there are two problems that would need to be solved in addition to implementing the feature itself. They follow from the description above. Firstly, you could not mark more than one message per thread as unread (every message after the first you mark as unread would also be considered unread; and should you first mark message X as unread followed by marking message X+N unread (where X and N are positive integers), message X would be again marked as read because you just read X+N to set it as unread). Secondly, you could not find again the point where you stopped reading the thread after marking one message unread (unless it is the last message of the thread).
As you can probably tell, a separate bookmarking feature would be more useful because it would allow direct access to interesting messages without affecting the way how read and unread messages are logged in the threads currently. I can naturally be off regarding the technical details of the forum software used in BB and its current features (I have never seen the source code of any forum software, let alone this one), but my explanation seems pretty solid based on one minute of testing the thread behaviour and several years of using the forums.
I would suggest for the benefit of the site to divide the supporter features "extras" from the following important two directories - Suggestion and Bugs.
The site will benefit from it, both those features should be supported for all users for those folders.
I do not follow. Bugs are fixed for everyone, not just Supporters. Some suggested features are implemented for all users, some only for Supporters. The Supporter features are generally those that require more from the servers. And all Supporter features are such that they give no in-game benefits.
Last edited by GM-WallyOop at 10/23/2011 1:03:21 PM