Pony: unvisited threads remain "new"

November 11, 2000 6:37 AM

It would be very nice to keep which threads have new messages static across visits, so if I'm unable to visit a thread with new messages in one visit, it's still marked as having new messages the next time I hit MeFI.
posted by cCranium to Feature Requests at 6:37 AM (1 comment total)

This week has been a shining example to me of how helpful it would be.

I've spent almost the entire week locked in a room with the developers I work with pounding out a new database structure and defining functionality for work. As such, I'm not able the check MeFi every 3 hours or so like I usually do while I'm at work.

I've ended up falling behind a number of times this week, and missing conversations because I'm never sure which threads I've read all the messages in and which threads I need to backtrack through the posts to figure out where I am.

I came in Tuesday night to find over 370 new messages. Wednesday saw over 200, and today (saturday) I've finally managed to catch up. Probably. :-)

I imagine the current system works by checking the last visited date for my user, comparing it against the dates of messages in threads, and summing the count of messages per thread that have a date greater than my last visited.

(of course, I could check this for sure if the source were opened. cough. I'll shut up now Matt. :-)

Would it be feasible to store a table containing something like:

UserID (int, pk1)
ThreadID (int, pk2)
LastVisited (datetime, pk3)

and using that to determine which threads have messages posted > LastVisited? I imagine the overhead to check that for everyone could easily approach infeasibility though.

(I know, a really sketchy pseudo-pseudo code mixed with overly high-level functionality description. I'm going to play the "it's saturday and it's early" card for my lack of descriptiveness though)
posted by cCranium at 6:44 AM on November 11, 2000