[CarCdr]

Well, you have a couple of choices. You need to associate the counter with a user, so you can add a column to the 'user' table or make a new table keyed on userid. That's the easy part -- having a place to store the counter.

The other easy part is displaying the information. It would be easy enough to modify the PHP function that assembles the information for use by the 'postbit' template to also make available your new counter. Then, in postbit you would just check to see if it is greater than zero and, if so, display it somewhere in the user information.

The harder part is:

1) Figuring out what triggers should be used to increment/decrement the counter. (design)

2) Figuring out where in the vBulletin scripts one has to add code to implement the triggers.

Given your approach of using simple thread icons, you could modify newthread.php and postings.php (edit thread action) to note when a thread is being flagged as news so that the user table counter can be incremented.

I would recommend a kludge here -- only increment the counter -- only track when a thread is being flagged as news. This would be easier and still give you the feedback you are after.