How do you tell if a topic is read or not?

Mokkan

I'm working on a forum with some friends of mine, and we hit a wall, it seems... what's the best way to determine whether a topic is read/unread? The only 2 ways I can think of are with a table, or with a cookie... both ways seem innefficient. Anybody have any ideas/advice/tips? Thanks 🙂.

deep

If you are using mysql it should be easy. Using one of your tables you could have a column called 'read' thats an integer and has the default value 0 (which means unread). When a user then clicks on the topic the value in this column is changed to 1 (telling the script that the topic has been read).

Hope that helps. 🙂

Mokkan

The problem with that is, all the users will be reading the same column, so it will change the value for all users. Wah...🙁

deep

dont the users 'log in'? If they do you could place this column in your 'users' table (hopefulle all your users got different id's).
That way you can keep track on everyone that has read the topic and has not. 😉

Mokkan

This would work...

... if I had only one topic in the forum. :p You see, that would change the value to 1, and it would set it for all topics.

deep

right, sorry about that :rolleyes:

Im not sure... i was thinking about adding a second table that stores the user_id and tipic_id and that way check if the topic has been read. But i think you should go to www.phpbb.com and have a look at how they do this. Its an open source forum thats great for learning.

hope that helps.

Mokkan

That's a very good suggestion, thanks 😉. I'll be sure to check it out. And that table idea isn't so bad, but instead of one for each topic, thered be one entry for each user, and one field stores the userid, the other stores the topic id's seperated by |'s, and I can explode it when I'm checking for read/unread topics.

😃

Thanks 😉.

Codemaster007

...but instead of one for each topic, thered be one entry for each user, and one field stores the userid, the other stores the topic id's seperated by |'s, and I can explode it...

The only problem with this is that, if you get a lot of topics, that delimited list can take up a lot of room, and depending on how you've got your db set up, it could overflow the field.