A CI-developed forum?

[eluser]BorisK[/eluser]
Why keep track of unread messages? I let the browser do it for me. Most of people use one browser on one computer. Visited links are colored slightly different. The link to the topic includes the topic id and number of replies so that people always know what they've read since last time.

Here's an example forum link.

Click on a topic and then click back! Voila!

[eluser]Sarre[/eluser]
[quote author="BorisK" date="1225015479"]I let the browser do it for me. Most of people use one browser on one computer. Visited links are colored slightly different. The link to the topic includes the topic id and number of replies so that people always know what they've read since last time.[/quote]
With some css you can easily use this technique in a more interesting way (as on most forums there's an icon indicating the read-status of the post):
http://www.scoutseeklo.be/test.html
Just by using css pseudoclasses...

Code:

<style type="text/css">
a:link:before {
  content: url('/www/images/icons/bullet_green.png');
}
a:visited:before {
  content: url('/www/images/icons/bullet_black.png');
}
</style>

Of course, internet explorer doesn't like this... (try firefox, opera or chrome)

[eluser]Adam Griffiths[/eluser]
I would put in a function much like the one on here "view new posts" just store a last login time and a time each post was created in the database. Then you search through the db for posts made after your last login, et voila you have unread messages.

That's the theory anyway.