Help with forum markers

[AdySmith]

Hello!

I'm currently developing my own forum software and I am having some trouble with making the on / off forum markers turn on and off depending on if you've read the post or not. I used cookies but I think I've done it wrong. Does anyone have any alternative ways to do this, or could guide me through using cookies to do this?

Thanks, Ady

[Kurrel]

Before looking into alternatives, what exactly is going wrong with your cookies?

 

Is nothing happening?

Is it working sometimes or throwing an error?

[AdySmith]

Before looking into alternatives, what exactly is going wrong with your cookies?

 

Is nothing happening?

Is it working sometimes or throwing an error?

 

Well, it works sometimes. I made it so all the forum markers are on by default, but when you view a thread it creates a cookie that tells the site to change the marker for that thread to be off. I can't think of how I can remove the cookies if someone makes a new post though, so I'm wondering if using cookies is a good way to do this. Also there have been no PHP errors with it.

Thanks for the help!

[revraz]

Going to be tough to use cookies for this, since you can only have 20 per domain.

[AdySmith]

Going to be tough to use cookies for this, since you can only have 20 per domain.

 

Oh right. That isn't very helpful then lol. Do you have any alternative methods?

[cooldude832]

the easiest way to make read/not read forum threads is a single simple mysql table

 

ThreadID PostCount UserID

 

Basically each time the page is viewed by a "userid" it grabs all data present in the above table.  Then while you are splashing out the post you say if(!isset($row['ThreadID]')) {//New Post}

elseif($row['ThreadID']['PostCount'] != $realpost count){//Old Post with New Messages}

else{//Its been read and all post viewed}

 

Now this will become an ungodly large table eventually, but its not a big deal cause its storing about 10 bytes max per row.  You can probably get sql to do 90% of the work and simply return to you a integer between 0-2, however that would be an sql issue not sql.

[AdySmith]

Thanks! I didn't use your method, but your explanation helped me figure out a better way of accomplishing this.