If I find a story that interests me very much, I might look at the comments more than once. For example - I read them first when they are just 5, then maybe when they are 25 and perhaps finally when they are 66. The problem is that I don't know which comments are new so every time I have to read them all again. A way of marking all of them as read and than displaying them with 50% opacity or with another border/background would be a great time saver.
What do you think?
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Member since:
2006-06-03
IIRC, there are about 10,000 comments on Osnews, or maybe more. Keeping track of read markers for every user for every comment on the server would be a ridiculous performance hit.
Keeping a list of every comment in cookies on the client wouldn't work either, for performance reasons.
The only way to do this would be to record the highest current comment id, and then mark any comments with a higher ID as unread on the next viewing, but then how often do you update the reference id?
Member since:2006-05-18
Keeping the highest comment ID as a marker would work really well. And they could make a link like "Mark all comments as read" to update it only if the user uses this feature. Also they could delete markers from stories that are more than 7 days old, because it would be rather unlikely that those stories would get new comments.
Member since:2005-08-12
Every forum in existence does it.
PhpBB, the only forum whose implementation I am familiar with, simply marks everything that has been posted since the last time a user visited as unread, and then tracks via (I think) a session cookie what gets read. This way there is almost no added load to SQL.
Member since:2005-08-12
Member since:2007-03-26
All you'd do is record the last time that thread was visited thus any posts > last visit date = 50% opacity.
It's quite a good idea for those of us who view OSN in nested view.
Member since:
2006-07-30