Question

[Rayman3_tk]

Hi there!

I've been wondering for a while how they did the 'you haven't read this thread yet' options in most of the better bulletin boards. You know, that little highlighted picture etc. for example. Could someone explain me how that's done exactly?

P.s.: Not that I'm making a forum; just curious... 🙂

[weekender]

well you make a table 'read_threads', then when a user reads a thread you store in the table the id of the thread and the id of the user.

then when the user browses, if there is not a record corresponding to both that user and that thread, you display an unread symbol/format

[Rayman3_tk]

But doesn't that cost a lot of system resources? I mean: suppose that you've got 500 threads and 300 users. That would result in a lot of rows in the database. Isn't there another way?

[Moonglobe]

your example would at most produce 150,000 rows. that's nothing in any major RDBMS.

[Rayman3_tk]

Ok then. Thanks!