Determining unread items in a forum

Question

Using PHP and MySQL, I have a forum system I\'m trying to build. What I want to know is, how can I set it so that when a user reads a forum entry, it shows as read JUST for

Answer 1

There's no easy way to do this. There are plenty of ways to do it, but each grows exponentially larger as the user visits the site. The best you can do and still keep performance is to have a timestamp and mark any forums that have been updated since the last visit as 'unread'.