Borg - if this has been done to death then many others are having the same problem (if you would call it a problem) but you say that "this is the way that most forums work" I was hoping that you may get a chance to look into how other popular forums do do it like:
Invision
SMF
phpBB
Snitz
Invision is the best as it remembers everything and in my evaluation of just the above 4 forums (I haven't looked into others) I have not noticed any performance hit - perhaps we just need to think outside the square

Edited by ibaker - 21 July 2006 at 4:07am