How do I show if a user has read a record

Hi, this isn't specifically about an issue with your extension, more a query to see if you have an extension that can do what I am looking for.

I've built a forum, and all is working pretty good bar a few little niggles, but I would really like to know how to visually notify a user that there has been a response to a post. Just as this forum does, when a new reply is added to a thread, the text goes bold and an icon appears. Once the user has visited the page, icons are removed and text returns to normal.

What extension do you have that would enable me to achieve this? I have a feeling that cookie toolkit might do it, but I have never used it, so don't know if it's the right tool for the job, or how to implement it if it is.

This will take a lot of hand coding to accomplish.

you would need to have a column in the message table to lark whether the message was read or not, on page load, lookup the ID of the user reading the message, and if it matches the ID of the person that started the thread, update that column value.

So, this isn't something that I could achieve with cookies and have the users browser check the cookie and see if it's different in someway, And if it is different, then display the bold text and show an icon?

Is this not how cookie toolkit could be implemented?

Thanks.

it _could_ be done with a cookie as well, but remember cookies expire and they do not transfer from browser to browser. there are also limitations to the number of cookies that can be set and the size of the cookies that can be set, so using cookies for this is not very reelable. It would still require hand coding to accomplish.

when viewing a message, you would need to create an array with the id's of the messages that have been viewed.

then on load, you can check the IDs in the cookie versus the current message ID to see if it should be bold or not.

like i said, there are limitations to the cookie size though, so after viewing so many messages, the cookie will not be able to update any more, so you would need to clear the cookie when it gets to a certain size and start all over again.

either way, it's a simple concept to say "mark read messages", but not a simple concept to implement.