[Archbob]

That New Posts/No New posts thing.

Is there a tutorial on how to do this? I don't get how phpbb,vB, or IPB figures out if a post has been made in each forum and thread since they last were on the board. How do they do it without a billion queries? I can't do it without a pop-up, is there a tutorial somewhere?

[MadDog]

Its just an IF statement between the last post date and the last visit date.

[Archbob]

Well, yeah, the concept is easy but its mudier than that I'm afraid. How do you keep track of the last visit date? Do you keep an sql table of which visitors have visited which threads, that would generated a huge amount of data, and I see nothing in IPB doing that. And how do you know when to update last visited? If you updated it on every page view a person has, then there would be almost no new or "visited".

[MadDog]

Its just an IF statement. There really is no way to keep track of what threads have been visited and what ones haven't.

Usly a forum determines if the post is new by the last visit date, so to make it a not new post, the user has to close the window and come back so their cookie has been updated.

If there is an easier way, i would like to know it.

But storing the information in an SQL table is a very bad way of doing it.

[Archbob]

Originally Posted by MadDog

Usly a forum determines if the post is new by the last visit date, so to make it a not new post, the user has to close the window and come back so their cookie has been updated.

Waitm I still don't get how this is done. You have to keep track of every thread the visitor has visited, how do you do that?

[YourPHPPro]

You have to keep track of every thread the visitor has visited, how do you do that?

You dont have to keep track of every thread they visited - only the last time they visited the forum. Right after they login (or you retrieve the info from their cookie/session), you note the 'last' time they logged in. Then, when you query the database for threads, the ones that are 'new' are the ones that appeared between the visitors last time and now.