The Last Poster

[Ned_Flanders]

Ok, Steve - You've heard what we have had to say about that column in more than one thread We don't like it, it is a waste of space.

In this thread there are many ideas of what to do. This thread will consolidate those ideas and let the feedback cycle commence.

Slvr made a few screen shots to give you an idea of what we wanted (Well done, really good job), and I updated one of his ideas to add a layout which provides a lot of useful information in a small area.

This is the idea:

Remove the last Coloumn labled "Last Poster" and replace it with a new column labeled "New Posts".

This coloumn will show the number of new posts in a thread since your last viewing of the thread. Underneath this will be a small line of text saying "Last post on xxx". IMO (and others I believe) this layout will provide a good amount of useful information.

Sample screenshot:

Note the following changes (which have been suggested by me and others)

1. Removal of "Goto" and the post icon before "Page 1 2 3 "
2. Reordering of the columns so that "Replies" and "New Posts" are next to each other (Makes sense as they both releate the posts)
3. Most important - Addition of "New Posts" column

 

[Ned_Flanders]

Well I suppose ignoring this is just as good a way to refuse discussing it.

 

[slvr_phoenix]

:lol: :lol: :lol:
Does that mean we're thwarted?

 

[Ned_Flanders]

Looks like it. Shame, this could be done so easily and be a great feature. One that all users would benefit from. Hell, I'd even code it myself.

 

[Ned_Flanders]

One more thing Steve, if you read this.

You said you didn't have access to the new posts count?

You must have access to the number of posts count (As shown in the replies field) and the first new post. Since each post has a post number (i.e this is the 5th post) can you now do a simple bit of maths to work out the number of new posts?

 

[steve_sa]

It is a cpu intensive problem. Timestamp of all the posts have to be kept at the topic level. Then when looking at them at the forum level (where we need the counts) we count the number of posts since last visit to that topic. This counting is a cpu-intensive loop, as there are no inherent functions in php to say "show me count greater than ...".

Now imagine going down 50 or so topics at the forum level, with some topics having 10's of replies (which we do). This trasnlates into a lot of counting.

There is a simpler approach of just keeping track of the count of posts that were read (for each user). We can easily keep that info, the only problem is if you hit "mark all topics read" or "mark all forums read", that destroys this simple logic. I suspect the old forums used that simple logic to keep track-- but with the expanded functionality, we cannot do that.

I have thought about this, but I cannot find an elegant way of doing it.

 

[Ned_Flanders]

Hey Steve, I'm glad you took the time to respond.

Now I don't have to long online, so I can't fully process your response, but could a comprimise be made where after a certain amount of new posts the data shown just says above 10. i.e [>10]

That would limit the processing.