Forum Unviewed Posts

interactive

I know this has been discussed several times, but I have failed to find a decent answer to the question.

What I'm trying to find out, is there a none db intensive way of showing threads on a forum that a user hasn't viewed?

What I'm thinking of doing is setting a cookie with the last time of activity (which the main forum page would update, I think?) and then have a table with viewed topics so that even if the topic had a new post and the user had viewed a particular topic it shows it as viewed. Would just be 2 fields (user_id and thread_id for example).

I'm sure this will work, but is there a better way to do it? I'm working on building a huge forum site (that will actually be thousands of forums) and thus will need something as db-less intensive as possible. Thanks for your time.

tommynanda

Just Curious,

How is that efficient to use client-side cookies than server side DB?

Lets say that we have a table for each user, that stores his recently viewed thread numbers. Next time when the same user checks the forum, thread numbers stored in his table should be flagged as read. This is exactly how you would do using cookies too... Instead you will be depending on client.

I would suggest DB dependent

TommYNandA

interactive

Originally posted by tommynanda
Just Curious,

How is that efficient to use client-side cookies than server side DB?

Lets say that we have a table for each user, that stores his recently viewed thread numbers. Next time when the same user checks the forum, thread numbers stored in his table should be flagged as read. This is exactly how you would do using cookies too... Instead you will be depending on client.

I would suggest DB dependent

TommYNandA

My bad, didn't explain myself well enough.

I was saying storing a timestamp in a cookie, everytime the user visited the forum's homepage that timestamp would be updated. When a user view a particular forum it showed him which topics received a new reply since his last visit (ie the timestamp in the cookie). Then with the db, I would store which threads the user has viewed since that timestamp (so they appeared old), clean out the table when a new post was added to the thread and so fourth. Does that make sense?