Thread and Forum Marking -- Explain?

[MjrNuT]

Hello,

My search came up empty using what I have in my thread title. Apologies if my search was just poor, so please feel free to link me. This seems to be the right place for my followon questions, also.

Question 1:

I'm asking for help on someone explaining a bit more on the thread/forum marking in addition to the help dialog. Here is that portion:

This option controls how threads and forums are marked as read.
1. Inactivity/Cookie Based - once a user has been inactive for a certain amount of time (the value of the session timeout option) all threads and forums are considered read. Individual threads are marked as read within a session via cookies.

This option is how all versions of vBulletin before 3.5 functioned.
2. Database (no automatic forum marking) - this option uses the database to store thread and forum read times. This allows accurate read markers to be kept indefinitely. However, in order for a forum to be marked read when all threads are read, the user must view the list of threads for that forum.

This option is more space and processor intensive than inactivity-based marking.
3. Database (automatic forum marking) - this option is the same as a previous option, but forums are automatically marked as read when the last new thread is read.

This is the most usable option for end users, but most processor intensive.

Question 2:

What are most people setting theirs to? I'm assuming it may be different based on the wide variety of hosting situations and size of the board. Our board is small and is for a gaming community. No pruning is done.

stats: Threads: 859, Posts: 6,187, Members: 96, Active Members: 49

My premise w/ this thread is to have make sure the members are catching the Unread posts. Currently using Option 1 right now. So I'm pretty sure ppl are missing unread threads. I'd love to use the markup versiion that is used here on *.ORG, but I'm sure that is not possible.

Thanks for any input on this.