Forums - post is read
 

I've been working on a ASP .NET forum for a while now, and I've hit a bit of a snag. In any forum, you want it to track which posts you have read, and ones you havn't. Whats the most efficient way to do this? I cant imagine just throwing all that data into a database so I'm thinking theres some trick i'm missing.

Re: Forums - post is read
 

You could do it based on the last time they logged in. Then whenever they click a link use CSS to change it from a "Unread" style to a "read" style.

Re: Forums - post is read
 

I think he was wondering on how you retain the info on what to set to "read."

The way most forum software does it is to use cookies, along with the last session time. Record the time the user last loaded a page, and when it's been more than X minutes, mark everything as read. Until then, use a cookie to store what "unread" pages have now been read.