[eluser]jedd[/eluser]
An interesting article, despite its vintage (and the number of comments from people saying 'this doesn't work'). It looks like they also had a text field in there to track views, which is a bit weird. Not sure what limitations vbulletin imposed/imposes on its developers, though.
I think xwero was suggesting the [ thread / member / date ] combo (as opposed to my thread/member/message, and vb's user/forum/date - actually, how did they check a thread's read-status?). Anyhoo, it's effectively the same approach, but I preferred message # over handling dates for a few reasons. Ints are smaller than dates (at least, I thought they were, but for DATETIME / DATESTAMP this may not be the case). Certainly I reckon there's a cost involved in converting from date format back to internal storage format for comparisons. Mostly I just wasn't sure whether dates were going to be immutable on my messages - I am still pondering relying on table.id for chronology
order, with the option to change the date stamp of a given message to reflect the most recent edit.
