Erik has been pushing me to fix this problem for years, literally. I know it needs to be fixed but I'm not entirely sure how to go about it.

The real issue is that the forum needs to remember the "last message read" in each thread. Right now it just remembers it globally which is why when you read a new message in one thread it can make the flags go away in all the other threads.

But to remember the last message read in each thread is an interesting problem in and of itself. There are literally thousands of users and there are thousands of threads. Keeping track of the last message read for every user for every thread would be costly in terms of having to look that information up each time a user opens a thread. It could be done, but I'm concerned it could slow the forum down. If we have only 1000 users and 6400 threads (the approximate current number), we're talking about 6.4 million potential registers in a database. I think that's going to be slow.

Another possibility is to store the information in cookies on the user browser, but then I'm limited as to how many threads can be stored since there is a limit to the size of cookies and the cookie file in general. Perhaps I could just store the "last message read" number for the 50 most-recently read threads and store it in a user cookie?

Again, ideas are welcome. Erik mentioned this problem years ago and I haven't solved it not because I'm avoiding the issue, I'm just not sure what the best way to address it is.

Regards,
Craig Steiner
8052.com Webmaster