Unread information and notification

[kevinak]

I am attempting to make a bulletin board on my site where I can add information and display them almost like posts in the forum.

 

When the page is opened, there will be a list of all the announcements. I would like unread announcements to be marked as such for each individual user. Maybe just highlighted a different color, whatever, not the point.

 

My question is how would I go about knowing which announcements are read or unread for each user?

 

Like say in my database, I have announcement one with a timestamp, how can I make that show as read and unread to different users, while still having other announcements?

 

Yes, I do have phpbb3 installed on my site.. And you are probably like WHAT?, why would you want to do this if you can just have an announcement cat? Well, I'm crazy, stupid, and love to do my own things.

 

[php.ajax.coder]

I would have three tables in the database

 

1. Users - UserID,  IP

2. Posts/Announcements PostID etc

3. viewed - UserID and PostID

 

Add each new IP to the users table

and then add an entry to the viewed table when the post is read.

 

Then check for entry to see if viewed

[kevinak]

What if there is a large number of members. So like over time 100 announcements x 2000 members = 200,000 rows in the table.. does that matter?