Mark a Forum read Hack

I need help with this, I would like to be able to mark a specific forum as read, instead of the whole board.
Anyone have any idea on how to do this?

I don't think you can do this, since to mark forums read all they are doing I think is updating the cookie.

Vbulletin doesn't actually track what you have viewed.

I think it does, cause when you click on a thread, that threads folder will be marked off right away

Here is how vBulletin tracks your session....

1. It has a cookie timeout. When this timeout expires, it marks all forums as read.

2. When you visit, it compares the timestamp in your cookie and profile with the posts and forums. Any that are newer are marked as New.

3. As you view each individual thread, vBulletin updates a second cookie which is only valid as long as you actively visit the site. What it does is add each thread that you have read into this cookie. If a thread is listed here, it overrides the timeout cookie and is marked as read.

vBulletin does not track what forums you view or what threads you view internally. To track threads would create an infinite number of records and kill all but the mightiest server when new threads are updatate.

example:
You have 15,000 threads and 5,000 members (a Medium sized board). When the 15,001st thread is made, instead of writing 1 record, vBulletin would have to write 5,001. One for each member and one for each thread. When the 5,001st member signs up, vBulletin would have to write 15,002 records. One for the user profile and 15,001 to track each existing thread. Of course you can simplify this with default values and other SQL optimizations but your tracking table would still have (members ^ threads) number of records. Or in the example above: 5000 to the power of 15,000.

Again you can simplify this a little but the problem still remains on how to flag each thread. This doesn't even account for resetting the flags every time a new post is made in a thread.

Forums would be a little easier to do but the complexity is again exponential. Imagine a site with 100 or more forums and 18,000 members.

I see what you are saying wluke.
There must be a way though of changing how vbulletin handles cookies.
I would be nice to mark a forum/thread as read right after you read it.
I guess it would be a mojor modification, and it's probably not worth it

Thanks for the great explanation.

[JJR512]

In reference to wluke's #3 above... I think there is a bug with that feature. I have seen it in action, seen it work, but I have also seen something else. If I go into a forum and read things there, the folders get marked as "read", which is how it's supposed to be...and if I go into some other forums and read things there, everything is fine...but if I eventually come back to the first forum, the threads that I read will be marked once again as "unread". Now this doesn't happen if I leave the forum and come right back; it seems to require some time to go by first. But not necessarily inactive time; in other words, the cookie hasn't timed out...the threads are still "unread" (if it had timed out, they would be marked as "read"). And it is not due to new replies, either.

In reference to the general idea of this hack, depsite all that wluke has said, it doesn't seem that it should be that hard to do. wluke's description of how it would need to be done seems like taking the hard way. Why not just throw in a little routine into the vB code that checks the "threads read" cookie that wluke was talking about, and if it sees that all new threads in a forum are listed as read, it marks the forum as read, too.

[Mike Sullivan]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by JJR512
If I go into a forum and read things there, the folders get marked as "read", which is how it's supposed to be...and if I go into some other forums and read things there, everything is fine...but if I eventually come back to the first forum, the threads that I read will be marked once again as "unread."

[Wayne Luke]

No domain is allowed to have over 4K of cookies, ever.

Could this be done with session variables only instead or using cookies at all?