Thread icons don't update

[silent tone]

Why don't the thread icons change after you have viewed a thread or a new message is posted to a thread you have already viewed? It's a PITA.

 

[Confused]

On a forum as huge and with as much traffic as this one, it will make the database crawl to a halt if it has to know exactly which threads you have read, and whether anyone else has replied to it.

On much smaller forums like those typically running something like phpBB, where this happens, it doesn't slow down the forum any, as these writes and reads to the database as you read a thread to mark them as read aren't happening too often.

There are typically 200-400 people logged in and hundreds more just browsing without being logged in. Having the database written to every time someone reads a thread to say it's been read would probably kill the database servers from all the extra work it will have to do 🙂

Therefore, the best way for a site this big to work is by marking everything since the last time you visited (which is stored in your cookies, so no unneccessary database writes) as unread.


Confused

 

[Jason Clark]

That would kill a server real quick, every time you read a thread we'd have to update a field in the db. There are on average 2-4000 users simultaneously using the forums. Smaller forums would probably be ok, but larger installations would just slow to a crawl.

 

[sciencewhiz]

seems like the perfect use for a cookie (which is how vbulletin does it, don't know about others)

 

[Jason Clark]

Actually no, that won't work as there is a max size for cookies and a max amount of cookies per domain, if you are to allow the user to have a constant record of what he/she has read. It is on our list of todos though.