What's the purpose of Mark Forums Read and can I disable it if it's of no use to me?
 

I'm trying to figure out the purpose of the "Mark Forums Read" feature in the footer of the tables, and the manual is not very clear on this.

I pressed it just to try it and apparently it does indeed make all the threads appear as though I have read them, i.e. the cookies are cleared (or set) to make it appear as though they have been read.

Okay, now why would one want to manually do that? Don't the cookies automatically take care of this once they open the threads to read the unread posts? It seems that if someone were to click on this out of curiosity (like I just did) it would frustrate them because now they won't know which threads had the new posts that they now aren't able to see as being unread.

Is there a way to disable this from the footer? Or better yet, how can I disable the footer altogether, as I have no use for the "View Forum Leaders" feature either.