per-user tracking of read/unread messages

Posted by Graham Perrin on Mar 29, 2011; 9:27pm
URL: https://support.nabble.com/server-side-marking-of-read-messages-tp5735737p6221008.html

Highlighting messages that are posted after a certain time is (unless I'm missing something) equivalent/comparable to treating everything past as read.

A date of last visit approach will suit some but not all use cases.

For some types of forum/application, I usually pay visits that are infrequent and very brief — attending only to things that must be prioritised. Then eventually for that same forum/app, an extended phase of me ploughing deeply and happily through a backlog of things that I have not previously seen. Then again, a phase of visits that are infrequent and brief. So for me, a date of last visit approach would too often give a false impression (read) for the majority of items (truly unread).

My own working habits may be edge case (peaks and troughs of activity that are extreme), but there must be many less extreme/edgy use cases, where people spend:

* time on a project
* time off a project
* time on
* time off

— and so on.

A gold standard solution is probably server-side tracking per user, so that the user can seat him/herself at any computer and gain the truest possible view of what's unread. I see that as gold because it's one of the few areas in which a feature of Nabble doesn't match mainstream alternatives.

Bronze might be, a Converse UI in which the gold standard is marred by a single ambiguous icon, which when clicked accidentally, marks the entire forum as read — with no undo.

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If server-side tracking is an issue (performance?) then instead, how about
HTML5 client-side database storage?

I don't imagine that it would be easy to implement, but it would be smart. Silver standard :-)

Thanks