why does the new post icon sometimes spin?

you know the little icon (looks a bit like a letter on the left hand side by your thread tittle) which says if there are new posts why does it rotate particularly on larger threads?

I'm not sure why I guess it was just set up that way... by whoever designed the site originally...

Thanks for replying

It seems to only 'scroll' for threads with three or more pages to them... ??

No, I don't think that's it. I've been wondering the same thing myself. I just saw 2 threads next to eachother, both with 2 pages of posts. One scrolling, the other not. The only pattern I can see is if a thread reaches 19 posts, it starts scrolling.

I am sorry guys I have a weird habit of spotting these things and it bugging me because I dont know why it happens and now you are going to be wondering why it does it. At first I thought it meant someone was reading the thread and on the larger threads it took so long to read it did it more often but they are constantly doing it so it cant be that. Obviously I have put way to much thought into this .

Some forum systems use a special icon to indicate particularly large or active topics.

Some times it's just based on post count (like it probably is here) and other times it is based on how often posts are made. Here it just seems to be a indicator that a lot of posts are being made to a thread, and not much else.

Edit: in other words, it's just an alternate icon, which is in itself animated. Nothing special is causing it to move, and once a thread gets the icon it will continue to have it, which is why it's constant.

Thanks Gwilly I can stop obsessing over that now

haha - thanks Gwilly. I had a brief look through the admin section and couldn't see anything that I could actually modify to change this setting. it must be built-in to the PHP system that we use?