A couple of questions...

stezz

Hey everyone! How you all doing?

Im making a forum, and have a couple of questions regarding forums.

When a user clicks on a topic, they are taken to the topic itself where it can be read and replies can be made. When a reply is made, it looks exactly like this forum with replies. Except for one thing. I can't figure out how to make each reply alternate between two different background colours. How is this done?
I have posted regarding this issue a couple of days ago and was told to make a search about it. I didn't find what I wanted in the search, so I tried to do it myself and ran into a few problems. It's to do with "next" and "previous" buttons. If you would kindly make a search on this forum for a topic "wired problem" by myself, my problem is explained there.
I also want my users to be able to have smilies in their posts. Therefore I need a way of turning "🙂" or ":-)" into the smiley picture. I've done this before using eregi_replace (i think), but I can't remember how I managed to get it all working.
How do I distinguish between a "read" topic and an "unread" topic per user? I want each user to know which topics they've read and not read so I can mark them accordingly.

Thank you for you time reading this post. I hope someone out there will be able to help me achieve my goals.

Regards, Stezz.

Weedpacket

Both (1) and (2) are covered in this forum's FAQ. (P.S: the word is spelled "weird" and who's going to be searching for "wired" or "weird" anyway? It's a stupid word to use in a subject line.)

(3) Try searching for "smilies" in the forums.

(4) I think this board just records for each user the last time they did something, and counts all posts made since then as "unread". Otherwise, a list would need to be maintained of every post on the boards for every user.