Okay, in phpBB, Invision Powerboard, VBulletin, and other forum software the icon for unread posts and forums is different than read posts and forums. So, my question is how do I make it so something such as a forum software will be able to tell each user (individualy) what forums and posts are not read without having to create a new field for each time one is read.
You obviously need user-thread relation for each user that logs on. Then it gets tricky because of the size (e.g. DP has 4K active members and 22K threads = 88M pairs). However, because users only need to see the read/unread flag for those threads that are visible, you can keep this size under control. For example, only track those threads that were created a few minutes prior to user's last request. Other tricks could include tracking forums that a user visits rarely and marking a couple of top threads as unread as soon as a user visits such forum, but at the same time, track many threads in those forums that user visits daily. Try going to DP forums that you don't visit often and you will see what I mean. J.D.
Alot of forums only track for the last 30 days so are using cron jobs to purge old records. Did you understand the bit about the M:M table linking users and threads? sarah