1 Topic by Jonex

  • Registered: 2005-02-22
  • Posts: 20

Topic: Suggestion/Tips: Use browsers own history for read threads.

There's many ways of solwing the readed threads issue, som go just by new threads since last visit, others have to save every visited thread in the database.
I've come up with yet another way, a way that's wery light on the server.

The idea is that you name the thread urls after the last post, that way you can add an image showing if the thread have been read with some css.

The dowside may possibly be that the links change all the time. That is solvable though.

Any thoughts or questions?

2 Reply by graue

  • graue
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  • Registered: 2005-02-18
  • Posts: 71

Re: Suggestion/Tips: Use browsers own history for read threads.

This has been suggested in an old topic before, though I'm not sure if anything ever came of the suggestion.

There's a bit of a problem though: What if a topic has 3 replies when you generate the list, but by the time you view it, it has 4 replies? It will think you have only seen three.

It might be a good idea though. LiveJournal allows a similar method for tracking read comments.

3 Reply by Jonex

  • Registered: 2005-02-22
  • Posts: 20

Re: Suggestion/Tips: Use browsers own history for read threads.

graue wrote:

There's a bit of a problem though: What if a topic has 3 replies when you generate the list, but by the time you view it, it has 4 replies? It will think you have only seen three.

Yes, I thought of that, and actually I got a sollution to that, though  it may seem a bit ugly.

What you would do is that you have the link to the last message only used for the new-posts-image and the normal threadurl for the main link. And when you access the page it opens the last-post page in an IFRAME. (I think that should mark it as read)

Not sure if it works, I'll have to try when I get more secure with the PunBB source.

4 Reply by Paul

  • Paul
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  • Registered: 2003-08-13
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Re: Suggestion/Tips: Use browsers own history for read threads.

IFRAMES don't validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict. For that to work PunBB would have to change to the transitional or frames doctypes.

5 Reply by graue

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Re: Suggestion/Tips: Use browsers own history for read threads.

Maybe a 301 redirect would work?

  • From: 127.0.0.1
  • Registered: 2001-11-02
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Re: Suggestion/Tips: Use browsers own history for read threads.

I can also imagine this will affect search engine indexing negatively. Also, it won't work with the url_rewriting scheme planned for 1.3.

"Programming is like sex: one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life."

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7 Reply by Jonex

  • Registered: 2005-02-22
  • Posts: 20

Re: Suggestion/Tips: Use browsers own history for read threads.

graue wrote:

Maybe a 301 redirect would work?

Hmm, yeah, if IFRAMES won't do then redirecting sounds like good idea, when you access foo.com/bar?thread you get redirected to foo.com/bar?lastmsg.

Hmm url-rewriting, what is that?

8 Reply by graue

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Re: Suggestion/Tips: Use browsers own history for read threads.

http://punbb.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=6417 would be replaced by http://punbb.org/forums/topic/6417, something like that. See the Feedback wanted on URL rewriting thing topic.

9 Reply by Frank H (edited by Frank H 2005-02-22 15:21)

  • Frank H
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Re: Suggestion/Tips: Use browsers own history for read threads.

I wrote a forum a while back, that used the browsers own history to know if the user has read it or not (and I appended "&replies=4" to the url, and when someone replied I upped the value, and browsers hadn't seen that url wink).
Worked fairly ok, but people looking at the forum on different locations, say at work and at home, had very hard to track what they had read and not, so, it's really not a great solution IMHO...and features like "mark all as read" is also harder to do