What's the best way to do this?

Okay I have a custom made forum on one of my sites. What I'm trying to do is have the thread become bold when your on the view thread page example. Once the user enters the thread though I want that bold to go away untill there is another new post in the thread. I can think of a few ways to do this but they all seem very mysql hungry.

 

Anyone have any idea?

 

Use cookies

 

set a cookie for every thread the user looks at?

 

cookie will track your clicks, bold means, you havent click the link yet(in this case). Not just bold, you also can change it to other color, try use css.

find some thing like this in ur css file:

.xxx a {
 ....
}
.xxx a: hover {
 ... 
}
.xxx a:visited {
 ...
}

Code (markup):

play around with that

 

That's right - set a cookie with name = thread title (formatted to be accepted) and value = date of the visit: then if there's a message newer than the date of last visit show in bold, otherwise in plain.

 

So you're gonna end up with 200 cookies? And I'd use the topic ID's if it's a forum...

 

Yeah, that's right - otherwise how can you mark threads as "read" for unregistered users?

 

I'm not worried about unregistered users just the ones that have already signed up