Which posts are new posts?

jc94062

On a lot of message boards when you visit them they'll have new posts symbols, sometimes it'll be a picture being different, or just the word new appearing next to new posts since your last visit.

Does anyone know of a good tutorial for working out how to do this? There are lots of mb tutorials out there, just I can't find one concerning this particular aspect.

I hoped I'd be able to figure it out from source code, of say phpBB, but as their method doesn't work, working out a faulty method doesn't seem productive!

I know I could obviously do this by having a massive table of users and updating it every time they visited a post to show which are the latest posts, but even if the message board only has 50 users and a 1000 posts thats still 50,000 rows in one table!

Thanks for any help

Anon

Well there are many ways to do something like this. You could store all of the message ID numbers in a cookie and keep that data on the users system. Then when they view a message all you have to do is update the cookie and give it back to the user.

There are others, but this one solves the problem of having a very large database table to store this information.

jc94062

Yeah, but then if the cookie gets deleted or anything that mucks it all up, I know its possible to do it via a database, and it must be one of reasonable size, I just can't figure out how.

zirius

If all you want is to show which messages are new since the users last visit, you can simply store the time of the users last visit in a database and when they log in again you retrive the time from the database and mark all messages that are newer than that.

jc94062

But that means that as soon as they view ONE new post, all new posts are marked as read, isn't there a better way?

Thanks

zirius

Not necessarily... When your user logs in you can retrive the time from the database and store it in a cookie. After that you mark all messages that are newer than the value stored in the cookie. You don't need to get a new value from the database everytime the user views a post.
Of course, this means that when a user reads a message it will still be marked as new untill the next time the user logs in, but there are ways to solve this as well (using another cookie to store which posts has been viewed since last logged in).

jc94062

So when they login you set a cookie with their last logged in time, then you update that time in the database after setting the cookie I presume?

I guess its not perfect, but its the best that can be done

Tkx for the help