Building a forum...

dbmasters

I have built a few forums in a couple of languages and databases. They have all been very nice, fast and functional.

I have two theory questions, one of which I want to do, and one of which I want a concept of how to do, unsure if I will.

1- The one thing I want to do but never have previously is indicate "unviewed topics" or "new topics since last visit", however you want to word it. I can't wrap my head around how would be the best way to track which topics have been viewed and which haven't without having a db table that tracks user and topic clickthru, when that topic is updated, the records are removed accordingly...blah, blah blah. Which, in my mind seems rediculas. There must be a way to set a time of last logout and the next return use that somehow...but even that isn't perfect...

I dunno, any thoughts?

Secondly, and I dunno if I will do this, rather than one long string of posts, how on earth does one make a "thread with all the different levels of replies to different messages in the thread...that has to be the ultimate in nested and looped queries or something...

BuzzLY

Unviewed Topics

This is a tough one. If you truly wanted to mark each topic the user views, then you may have to either create a table with the user_id matched to the topic_id (which of course can get VERY large), or track viewed topics in the user's cookie (not too scalable). I would recommend you track new posts since their last visit, much like PHPBuilder does, and most other boards do.

Nested Replies
This can be done -- I have seen this sort of thing on many boards. However, I'm not sure of the value. If you did want to do it, I would have two "parent id" fields. One is the ultimate parent id, and is the id of the original topic. The other is the immediate parent, which of course is the id of the post this post is replying to.

Once you have your result set, then you can apply some sort of logic to sort and indent them properly.

As I said, though, I am not sure I would do this sort of thing. You can just relate the reply to the original, and allow the user to quote any text they want to, the way vBulletin and phpbb do.

dbmasters

Thanks, yes the nested replies I don't see the value in myself, but some users like it, and just me wanting to know how the heck to do it, I figured I would investigate it. I do see the need to store the forum ID, the topic ID and the immediate parent ID, but then querying it and looping at different depths is where I get lost.

The unviewed topics I do want to do, but storing each user id and topic Id could get insanely large, how do other do it? When do last visit timestamps get set and reset to compare against new topics? Maybe I am just thinking to hard about it, and there is an easy answer, but I can't see it.

BuzzLY

I think most sites that do this will show you all threads that are new since the last time you logged in. THEN, as you view posts, it will mark them as viewed. I'm not sure the technique used, but I know phpbb does this, since I run a phpbb site.

I'd download their app and look through it. If you are trying to do different things in your forum, phpbb is a good one to "cannibalize" for ideas, since it's open source.