[Spinball]

Originally Posted by bchertov

I'd love some partners (either programming or buck$) to join me in developing it. It could be offered as a pro (paid) hack. AJAX could be put to great use in this, but its beyond me.

Thanks!

Kirk Y has developed a couple of paid mods for me, and a post report system is next. It's already specified reasonably well.

The goal :
To easily indicate to moderators on a real time basis which posts have been checked. This mod affects the display of forumdisplay.php and showthread.php to moderators only and I'm calling it the Checkpoint system.
Permissions:
This system does not kick in unless a moderator (supermod/admin) is viewing a forum which they have permission to moderate. It has no effect on the forum experience for anyone else.

Core functionality:
Showthread.php:
Posts which have not been checked appear with the same background colour as they do now. Posts which have been checked appear with a user defined colour (let's say green for now) to indicate they have been checked. This is the easiest method I can think of to quickly show the posts which need reading.
When a thread is opened, all the posts which are displayed are immediately marked as checked. We are assuming that the moderator is opening the (page of) posts to check all the posts there. We have to make this assumption in order to immediately mark the posts as being read so that no other moderator will start checking them.
Since a moderator may want to bug out of checking the posts in a page or may manually want to change the checked status, there should be inline moderating options to 'check posts' and 'uncheck posts'.
Checking a post writes the moderator id (or name if this saves significant database resource) plus a timestamp to the post record. Unchecking a post clears this information.

forumsdisplay.php:
Moderators need to see which threads need attention.
The threads with all the posts checked are displayed with the same colour background as checked posts (e.g. green). There will be a new column, probably to the right of the post icon, which shows a count of the number of unchecked posts in a thread. Moderators have the option to sort the threads by the number of unchecked posts (in order to display the threads with the most unchecked posts at the top) and by the date of the newest post checked timestamp (in order to display the threads with the oldest unchecked posts at the top).

Activation:
Since moderators may want to surf their forums without automatically checking posts when they open them, the checkpoint system must have a method of easily activating/deactivating the automatic checking for the current session.
I'm not sure where this button/link should be located. Maybe in the nav menu? Activate/Deactivate Automatic Post Checking is a bit long winded.

Options and permissions:
There is an option to set whether automatic checking is enabled or disabled by default for moderators (probably yes), supermoderators (probably no) and admin (definitely no in my case).
There should be an option to define what colour is used to indicate checked posts and threads.
Possibly more options. Can't think of any right now.

Undecided things:
Should the auto checking system work on posts displayed by the showpost script? I'm thinking no because all the moderator has to do is click the thread link above top open that post and the following posts in showthread.php.