Bulding a forum, but how ?

[Futte]

Hi

I'm working on a site (ASP) and I'm thinking about implementing a forum.

I've already figured out how to manage all the posts, threads, and "forums".

My question is this : How do I manage which threads are "new" and "unread" for each member or guest at the forum ?

Any comments or ideas on solving this will be greatly appreciated.
Thanx.

[Kagey]

You could just record when the user logs in and then next time they come select all threads that have a reply greater than that date.

[Futte]

Hi Kagey

Sounds like a pretty neat solution to this problem, I'll give it a try

Oh - btw - another question (for all maybe ?) - I've been thinking about putting in image smileys like in this forum. My first idea was to just parse the text from the posting searching for matching "tags" and then cut them out, pasting the img code for it instead, however I fear that this could become slow when displaying say 20 postings from one thread.
Would this be a stupid way of doing it ? If so, do you maybe have a different way to offer ?

Any response greatly appreciated - thanx.

[JasonGS]

tippedcow.com has an ASP forum free for download, you could take a look and see how they do it.

[alexmac]

You could use the replace statement e.g.

replace(myText,"<happy>","<img src="happy.gif">

I dont think it would be that much slower as you are only adding a little text and once the image has loaded it is cached.

Alex

[Futte]

To JasonGS:

Thanx for the tip about tippedcow.com - it's a fairly big application, but seems to be working pretty good. I've been through the trialboard code and seen how they handle new posts.

To alexmac:

I've noted your suggestion and I will try a few test runs to see if it will do the trick. Great tip

I've been asking about this because I need to build a forum that is language independant. Most forums are based on the English language, but this one needs to be able to handle both Danish and English. Thanx for the help all.

Other things I've done recently :
O) Level-based security system.
O) Message system between registered users.
O) Controlable article displayer/editor for tutorials and guides. Currently supports two languages.

Let me know if you want to know more about any of them.

Keep up the great work guys

[alexmac]

Sounds like your going pretty well Futte. I have nearly finshed my own message board system just want to neaten it up a bit.
Have you put in a paging system? If you havent I would be happy to give you some sample code for that part. You could put a search system in if you havent already. just use the SQL like% statement.

Alex