Message read or not.

Czardas

I have a slight problem with the forums at my site.
Since I refuse to use any kind of freeware such as phpbb, I am building it myself from scratch.
However, there is a problem when I try to make out if a certain post has been read or not. As it is, I write the date the forum is viewed to the usernames data in my mysql-database.
That gives me the ability to compare the date of the latest post in a thread and the date written to the usernames.

The problem arises since I have to update this date which is written to the username at some point.
If I update it when the forum has been loaded, you can never tell which threads are unread if you would choose to reload the forum. I was thinking that there must be a better way of doing the checking.

My forum is located at Zelda Shrine.
I'd appreciate any help what so ever.

sarahk

I'm fascinated, why no freeware?

I think you need to look at your database design. I would expect that each thread would have a last viewed date, last viewed by username to achieve what you want. Not just the forum.

It would create alot of data to record all the links between users and threads but I imagine this site just ups the count when I view a thread and doesn't worry about dates or names.

What are you trying to achieve?

It looks very good so far.

Czardas

Well, first of all, freeware doesn't give you exactly what you want. You can not use the design of your site without much adoe and it is hard to integrate to a present system, for instance my membersystem.
Secondly, it is my opinion that a webmaster who can not manage the scripts of his site shouldn't bother.

As for my database, it consists of three tables:
1. Containing all the names of the different topics.
2. Containing the names of the threads.
3. Containing the actual posts of a specific topic.

Number one contains a 'lastpost' column which gives the id of the latest post. This number is then used to see if it was posted after the member last visited the site through comparing the date associated with the post with a 'lastvisit' column in the usernames table.
If I would to enable a different variable for each post, there would either be as many values as there are members in every thread (number 2 above), or as many values as there are threads in the table containing membernames.
I was hoping there was a better way of doing it.

sarahk

mmm...

I agree with the coding comment however if you look at the cost of starting from scratch versus customising you'll see why companies such as SAP, Oracle, Peoplesoft etc do so well. People have found that licensing and customising are cheaper and more likely to succeed that starting from scratch. Webmasters are no different in that respect than any other coder.

I'm not sure you're going to be able to get away from the join table linking users to threads. It would be little table with 2 id's and maybe a datestamp so wouldn't be too costly. You could perhaps clean out records older than 30 days and assume all threads older than that were read.

I also visit a site called universalthread.com and they use your current system of identifying new content. If you change from one forum to another and back you don't see the original content. On login I get to specify if my datestamp should be updated allowing me to see what I saw last time.

some thoughts, hope they help.

Czardas

Thanks for your help.