I made all changes per instructions above but i still see this:

Guest
(xx.xxx.xx.xx, Samsung)  01:13:55 PM Viewing the board index of .


Which that guest is me on my cell phone looking at an article.

This could be the incorrect area for this modification as it deals with older versions of TP.

I'm using the current one, TP 0.9.8. I tested it on a clean install of SMF 1.1.4 + TP 0.9.8 (no other mods installed) and it works, either for article id or $story['id'] which is the query string id for an article if present.

What I see:

Elrond  (***.***.***.***)     10:08:47 pm     Viewing the article Visual options A.

Visual options A links to the article ID in any case, whether the url I'm at is page=5.0 or page=visual1, which is the article's canonical query name by default install of TP.

What the confusing part is is that I made some update posts about this and some of the updates could have confused the original post. If that's the case, it's possible to undo the changes by going into who.english.php in your theme and who.php in sources folder and just reverse the changes.

If you installed this on a default theme and either you are using a different theme other than default or the forum's default is set to something other than default, and your other themes have language files separate from those in the default theme, or the theme you made the modifications to, it won't display it correctly, which is another possibility.

If you are using separate themes and each of them uses different language files, including who.english.php, then the changes have to be made to those who.english.php files as well.

I'm certain you probably followed the instructions right because this is happening to two people posting here.

Only other thing I might think might be wrong is that you may have replaced

$txt['who_article'] = 'Viewing the article <a href="' . $scripturl . '?page=%d.0">%s</a>.';

with...

$txt['who_article_unk'] = 'Viewing an article';

...which would give some problems like that. Those two entries in who.english.php would be separate lines. The who_article_unk is only as a backup in case it can't read the article id on the who's online list for some reason.

i'm using most update to date versions of SMF/TP........default variation theme

I'll go back over my edits, but its not about "what I see", its what I click

Sorry that what I put up didn't help much. This was obviously more complicated than I made it out to be.