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#343 New Post Notification
<b>Summary</b>: At the moment there is no way for users
to find out whether or not there have been new posts
posted to a forum or new posts posted to a topic in a
forum. This makes it very hard to know where to read
and post from an administrative point of view, and also
very hard to participate in discussions from a user
point of view.
<p>
,b>Description</b>: What I would like is for new posts
in forums and topics to be denoted by an icon, similar
to the way phpBB does it (screenshots below for reference).
<ul>
<li><a href="http://beret.net/lc/forum_index.jpg">Forum
Index</a></li>
<li><a href="http://beret.net/lc/topic_index.jpg">Topic
Index</a></li>
<li><a href="http://beret.net/lc/legend.jpg">Icon
Legend</a></li>
</ul>
In each of the screenshots above, when you're logged
in, the icons to the left of the topic name and forum
name change if posts have been made since the last time
you read the forums. That's the kind of behavior that
is needed.
Logged In: YES
user_id=288856
If you have questions on this, we can chat in IRC. There are about a
dozen different ways we could implement this... I would like it to be
scalable enough to work on Slashdot, so simply storing a user_pref for
every uid/discussion isn't very good. Maybe we limit it to the last couple
dozen discussions. But essentially all we really need to do is store the
maximum CID from the last time the discussion was read. Of course,
the downside is that this means an extra zillion DB writes in order to
retain this data, so we need to be VERY careful.
Logged In: YES
user_id=3660
I want to define new post. Here's my first stab:
Any comment posted since the last time you looked at the discussion in
either article.pl or comments.pl.
Implications: if you post a comment, any comments posted while you
were posting the comment would not appear new when you saw the entire
list of comments.
Or, if you are looking at only the first 25 comments,
when you got to page 2, the next 25 comments -- even if you've not seen
them before -- would all NOT appear new.
CmdrTaco: I am not too worried about the DB. It's just one record to read
or write each request, at most. That's not a lot, and we are already
reading a ton of user data for each request. I will make sure to work with
Jamie on designing this, though (to save him time, I'll come up with a
design, and then let him look it over).
Logged In: YES
user_id=170
That new post definition sounds very reasonable to me. My only concern
would be making sure that it is going to work on both new forum topics
AND new posts within forum topics. I don't know what that layer actually
consists of so I thought I would bring it up.
Logged In: YES
user_id=897619
This seems like a bit of overhead to me. What about doing a
simple hard-date cutoff for new posts? Tracking which posts
each user has displayed would soak the system for a lot of
bandwidth and storage. Alternatively, updating which
expanded stories have been witnessed, per user, is also a
lot of extra space to be throwing at a problem that could be
solved without any such data-trail.
I'd define comments posted within the last 20 minutes as new
and everything else as old. Let's remember that
slashdot/slash is *not* phpBB, and does not aspire to be
such, for obvious reasons. Stories posted that are even a
week old, may have newer follow-ups, so you would only
really want to track the newest comments of the front page
stories (and front pages of the section).
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user_id=3660
No longer valid.