You can view the forum without "signing in"- although I believe you cannot view the "Buy Sell Trade" area without signing in. All the other regular forums are viewable by anyone/everyone- signed in or not.

If, however, you specifically log out and it still allows you to post things- there is a problem with this board.

And yes, I have discovered that alot of the new browsers are trying to "BS" people into how "fast" they are- both IE and Firefox, on the newest versions, by default, only refresh webpages "automatically"- as in we have no idea how frequently. The "refresh stored webpages" should be set to "every time I visit" in your browser for alot of things on the 'web to function properly.

But back to the original question:

If you are not logged in- how would the system determine what is "new" to you? Also, you don't get the same "privileges" of a member assigned to you- you are simply a "guest" and cannot do anything but view the basic things that have been "allowed" for the wide-open public to see. The only thing that the system records is the last time someone logged in so the very feature you are asking about works properly. This single piece of data is stored in the database, not a "cookie" on your machine- this way it doesn't matter if you log in from one machine or 50 different machines- you will always be able to start where you left off the last time.