Unread posts problems

**Useless Hacker** · 10-03-2003, 10:37 AM

I have been having problems with messages being marked as read when I haven't actually read them. This usually happens if I log on and then IE crashes, and then when I log on again, everything has been marked as read. Perhaps you could set it so that posts are not marked as read until you actually open them? It's annoying to have to manually look for new posts.

**TheLion** · 10-03-2003, 11:23 AM

Try to remove all your cookies... I have this problem quite often and it's mostly a cookie problem.

**BlueCat** · 10-03-2003, 02:08 PM

Hmmm, that's a difficult one because it's your 'last visit' time that is used to work out if a post is new or not. I'm not sure how it works out that you have logged out, there's probably a timeout value somewhere, I'll investigate......

Meanwhile, try to find out why IE is crashing (does it need a reason?

) and use the 'posts in the last 1 day' thing to see what's most recent.

I'll see what can be done :batman:

**Eriken** · 10-03-2003, 03:48 PM

Aye Batman ;-)

In a perfect Delphi-world you could always make another "LastVisit" record, and call it LastVisitBackup. And make some sort of Button that Useless can click on which says "IE Crashed" or "I screwed up" or something which sets LastVisit := LastVisitBackup?

As in when they log in. LastVisitBackup := LastVisit and LastVisit := to whatever it normally is set to? ;-)

I'm feeling so competent right now (mind you, I've never really done any webprogramming) so I'm considering making Windows2500 :twisted:
_____
Eriken

**Useless Hacker** · 11-03-2003, 10:53 AM

Originally Posted by Eriken

I'm feeling so competent right now (mind you, I've never really done any webprogramming) so I'm considering making Windows2500 :twisted:

Are you sure you would be able to finish it by then?

**Useless Hacker** · 11-03-2003, 07:45 PM

Originally Posted by BlueCat

Hmmm, that's a difficult one because it's your 'last visit' time that is used to work out if a post is new or not. I'm not sure how it works out that you have logged out, there's probably a timeout value somewhere, I'll investigate...

The thing is, I may not have looked at every new post in my last visit, and then when I come back, they are not marked as new, so I might not notice them.

Originally Posted by BlueCat

Meanwhile, try to find out why IE is crashing ...

It only happens on a few of the computers at college, so there's nothing I can do about it really. Maybe I should persuade them to install Mozilla. :twisted:

**BlueCat** · 17-03-2003, 12:02 PM

Had a little look around and it seems that the easiest way to do it would be to store a record for every post for every user. At the moment that would be about 160(users) x 2400(posts) = 384000 records. That's just not practical. You can see why it's done per-session at the moment.

My solution would be to set a time limit, 3 days for example, for checking unread posts. Then we could keep records for each user of which posts they've read in the last 3 days. After that though, we'd have to assume posts were read or at least call them 'old posts' or something. Then when a users reads a post, if it is not older than the time limit, a record is stored for that user and that post. In the same script we could delete any records that referred to 'old' posts for that user. I think that would work, the time limit could be set in a users profile with an overall maximum set by Admins. If the tables got too big, the maximum value could be reduced.

Not the perfect solution, but the only way I can think of that doesn't involve a massive table

**cairnswm** · 18-03-2003, 04:57 AM

What about doing it by Forum. When I come to DGDev I always look at certain forums first. If you stored a last read date/time per person for each forum it could help.