"New Posts" Icon Behaviour

This has been discussed to death in some length, please do a search.

OK, lookjs like I'll have to go through it all again.

The actual feature is 'new posts since last visit' rather than just new posts, which is how most forums work.

Within a forum when you look at a new post a cookie is stored so it can be checked if the post has been viewed, which is quite easy and simple and doesn't course a performance issue.

However, on the forums main page the date of the users last visit is checked against the date of the last post, if the date of the last post is newer a new post icon is displayed.

Now, you  could go through a check if each of the new posts in that forum has been viewed, but this would require getting and reading in the date for each new post in that forum and checking against the cookie if it has been read.

This would require allot of database hits to do this processing, this would then mean, instead of 1 database hit for the data for that page and a processing time of 0.04 seconds you would be seeing upwards of 100 database hits on a forum like this and a processing time of 3 to 5 seconds. This would also lead to problems with server resources being used up for this very resource hungry procedure.

This means that for performance reasons on the forums mains page the feature needs to be 'New Posts Since Last Vist'.

As a type of solution to this the main forum page also includes a link at the bottom to 'Mark all posts as read'


Edited by -boRg- - 13 July 2006 at 9:31am

The forum session for a user is stored in the web servers memory, or in the database if you have edited the forum to store session data in the database.

This session data is stored for 15 minutes after the user was last active in the forum, after this time the session data is cleared for that user.

I've just checked and it is actually 20 minuets and as web wiz forums uses it's own more secure session tracking system you would need to edit the file functions/functions_session_data.asp on the following line to change the session timeout time:-

If CDate(sarySessionData(2, intSessionArrayPass)) < DateAdd("n", -20, Now()) Then