i could swear i used to be able to check the boxes on the side of forum view and go threw multiple pages and it would maintain the checked boxes from the previous pages. but now it deselects them, is there something wrong with my site or am i thinking of vbulletin or xenforo?

vBulletin did this. I've not had it work with IPB. It would be a nice feature to have.

Also, the ability to clear all previous checked items in a thread/forum view would be nice.

@fix3r It still works for me. It doesn't show until you select something on the next page though. But I've not had any issues with multi-select. A custom theme could be tooling with it though.