Forum Help

treeleaf20

How do forums deteremine if a message is still new since the last time a perso viewed it? For example this site has an icon for new posts since the last time I visited and then if I click on one it shows that it was read. I'm just not sure how the forums keep track of every user and which threads they viewed? Any help here is appreciated.

Thanks.

Weedpacket

Record against each user the time they last visited. Anything posted since that time is "new".

treeleaf20

Ok I could understand that but what if one users reads a topic and you would mark that topic as read. It would be false because there could be other people that haven't read the topic since their last visit. I guess I'm looking to determine each users read messages and evertyhing like that without taking up a huge amount of space in the database.

Weedpacket

Doesn't matter, the time of the user's last visit is recorded against the user, not the thread - so it doesn't matter if other users have read it or not because when you're deciding if they read the post you'd be looking at the time they last visited.

You'll note that this forum (for example) doesn't keep track of every individual thread you might have read, but instead only does it on a forum by forum basis (so against the user you'd have timestamps recording when they last visited the thread listing for each forum). Otherwise you would have to record every single thread the user has ever read, for every user.

treeleaf20

You'll note that this forum (for example) doesn't keep track of every individual thread you might have read, but instead only does it on a forum by forum basis (so against the user you'd have timestamps recording when they last visited the thread listing for each forum).

Would you be able to give an example of this. I'm still not 100% sure what your saying. It would seem that you would have to keep track of every single thread the user has read since their last visit. If they read a thread mark is with timestamp and leave the others alone. This seems like it would take up a lot of space. Thanks for the help.

bogu

You could do something like this. When users relogin you take the entire new topics id since his last login and you put them into a cookie.
When a user read a topic you get out the topic id from the cookie.
Basically you need to create a cookie when a user login and manipulate the cookie content when the user click to view the topic.
You can use SESSION's too.

treeleaf20

What if users don't allow cookies to be set, there seems like a way to be able to do this in the database but I'm not understanding how other then tracking every thread that a user checks which like I said earlier seems lik eit would take a lot of space.

SargeZT

Here treeleaf.

In each user, when they visit, you record a timestamp. Let's say it's 5 minutes ago.

When a new thread or reply is posted, you record that time into it's own row, like post_time.

When the user comes back five minutes later, it does a search for which threads have a timestamp > then when they were there, and filters those out.

It stores the time the user was there, and compares it against the creation time of rthe message/thread.

treeleaf20

Thanks for the continued replies. One question with your solution Zarge is how can I determine if that user has read the thread or not, similarily to this site I would like to put an icon saying new or something like that for each user, then when the user reads the thread the image should go away until a new reply is posted. Any ideas how to manage that?

Thanks