proper "mark as read" functionality (Page 2 of 2)

Its not good because its exactly the same as looking at a forum without searching at all.

Lets say you have a big forum and several hundreds of posts in the last 2 weeks. First of all its hell of a waste of effort producing all those results pages when they are not needed. Second, if say you have 30 pages of results of posts within the last 2 weeks do you really want to have to go through them to find the point you actully wanted to start at.

Actually, to make this a lot easier, maybe I will just change the parameter for "Recent posts" from show_24h to an integer so that people can change it themselves if they want to. An extension could then easily add a new search option. I'll put it on the list.

I think this is a great idea...

There was much talk about what would be sensibel and feasable. I've been using phpBB and SMF. Now I want to switch to PunBB because SMF is not a free (GPL'd) forum.

Concerning unread posts:
Say, I open the forum and there are 20 new posts. I start rreading and writing and then my beautiful neighbor rings at the door. When I come back I am logged off (or connection to the ISP has broken or my grandpa's dog ate the power cord). When I log in again - where are the marks of the 10 new posts I could not read in my previous session?

This makes sense and it is feasable and it is possible to code in a PHP software (although I myself could not do it). But I have seen it in function: Look at the Unread MOD in phpBB and look at the implemented function in SMF. Both were not causing any remarkable load for the mysqld in a website with 1K registered users and 130K postings in 3 years.
In both functions there were links to: "Show unread posts" (which shows all posts you haven't read) and "Show new posts" (which shows new posts since your last login.
And there was "Show answers to your posts" (which does the obvious)
The "Show unread posts" function can be tagged with a time limit (after x days the flags go away - in a FIFO way), so the amount of data would not get too large.

wobo

wobo: The only problem I see with your suggestion is that you can't store an infinite amount of read information in someplace (say, a text field in the users table). That's why the last visit time is so nice: it reduces the amount of data we have to store by a great deal
If you have an issue with the last visit time on your forum, you can use the Mark topics as read mod and set the timeout much higher (as in to several hours)

Erm.. FYI I did this one a while ago, before my computer blew up (unrelated blow up, lol) and I disapeared for a while. A true "read posts" does come across some problems though.

make a table "posts_(un)read" with "user_id" "topic_id"

Now choose to either add a value for each uid, every time a new pid is made, since new pid = topic_id has new post (post_unread)
or choose to add a value for uid/tid pair whenever that uid sees that tid. (post_read)

1) Is slow to make posts, and will increase the DB size as the number of inactive users increases.
2) Is fast to post, but will increase the DB size as the number of active users increases.

I've got some work to do yet before I can post this mod on punres. I'll probably go with #2 and at a later date implement a "pruning" feature that auto-magically assumes post over <Admin option> days old are read (and therefor don't need an entry in the database). Let's an admin "tune" the post_read table for their particular user group. First priority is getting the MDT mod/plugin/toolset (not really sure what to call it anymore 0.o). Expect this mod in a month from me, but if someone else wants to make it, be my guess (FYI: when I did it, I completely forgot to look in search.php... if you plan on making this, look in search.php to display searched posts are either read or unread ). Also, if 1.3 doesn't have this, or doesn't have a way of doing this that I like, expect a 1.3 extention

[antiflameshield]PS: I didn't really read this whole thread, and I don't remember why I didn't use the Mark topics as read mod 0.o[/antiflameshield]

wobo: that would probably a huge serialized string and would be far less good than an extra table or two

I'll make the switch to punbb in a couple of weks (2-3 weeks) from now. All problems solved, except this one. Are there any new infos about it?
I think I made it clear that such a feature does NOT increase the load, does NOT increase the size of the database too much, and does NOT slow down the forum.
The feature is a much asked for feature and people who did not know about it go "Ah!" when seeing it in daily practice.

Pls think about it again. Unfortunately I am not able to code this by myself and I do not know anybody who could do it.

wobo

Really? Reading the last posts in thei thread it did not seem so. All I read there is that some people said it would slow down performance.

Oh? Where? If so, then what were we talking about in the last posts of this thread?

Sorry but your answer confuses me.

wobo