I think what Marco is asking for Steve is the old chestnut of a list of all topics for all users with a ‘bookmark’ to show how far they have read through each one.

I will say my usual piece. If someone has a good, workable, efficient model they can show me then we would consider it but at the moment the sheer quantity of data required for even quite a small forum could be enormous.

Ok, now I understand why this feature isn’t implemented by default: you just didn’t experienced it as user.

In some major forum software like Simplemachines, PHPBB and VBulletin too, this is the normal behavior: you click on thread title and go automatically to the first post that didn’t read, indipendently if there are other methods to see unread posts or threads and I can assure you that this is very comfy.

Not all user have organized mind and rely on list of unread posts, many of them simply browse between topics and click on title that, for some motivation, awakes their attention and, doing that, if they already partially read that topic in the past, the better experience of use it’s to be addressed to the first unread post, not the first, not the last one.

So I want to ask you, if I take off the topics update dropdown menus (to make interface cleaner, for example) how can I reach the last unread post?

As there is a customized list for each user that shows which are the topics that user didn’t read, it means that somewhere it’s already memorized this information, right? so, should be so difficult to connect it to thread’s title?

Anyway, if it’s so difficult, I don’t want waste your time, this is a really comfy feature but you are not obliged to add it, of course.

I think that SP it’s a good forum, I insisted with client to switch to it, loosing many material of previous SMF one, like attachments, shortcodes and so on, because I rely on it and on your support, but there are some little refines that could make it even better and I advice which ones, IMHO.

In WP panorama SP it’s the best, other forums are not forum but Bulletin Boards, like BBpress, nothing to compare, but all is perfectible

Thanks a lot for your time

Marco

Let me ask you a question (related to my comment in post 16 above).

Let’s say you display 15 posts of a topic per page. A user starts reading at the top of the page and reads, say, 6 of the posts before moving to a different topic. How can we possibly determine how many of the posts on that page were actually read and how many were left to be read? Because I have no idea how that would be remotely possible.

Yellow Swordfish said
Let me ask you a question (related to my comment in post 16 above).

Let’s say you display 15 posts of a topic per page. A user starts reading at the top of the page and reads, say, 6 of the posts before moving to a different topic. How can we possibly determine how many of the posts on that page were actually read and how many were left to be read? Because I have no idea how that would be remotely possible.

It’s easy: registering the movement of eyes and thoughts of user, need only a good brain scanner

Seriously, I’m sure that you can find a better solution but this is my idea, using cookies, I made a little flow chart, hope it make sense.

Thanks

Marco

This is not actually possible. There are very strict limits to both how big cookies can be and how many one domain can store. You also have to remember that when a domain is requested by the user – all of the cookies for that domain are passed in the http header – one very good reason for limiting how many can be created.

If one wanted to try and follow this model then a better solution would be to use the local storage engine capability that is a part of the html5 specification and is supported on all major browsers. That might be worth investigating. Not – I hasten to add – that such a process would be simple and easy to implement.

One of the main problems with both cookies and local storage of course, is that they are only retained on the device being used at the time. Like perhaps most people these days, I surf the web using my laptop, my iPad and my mobile phone and neither cookies nor local storage are transferable between devices so the resulting behaviour from one device would not be echoed when I looked at the same page on a different device.

You’re completely right, Andy.

As I said, this is my idea for the logical flow but for sure there are other ways to implement something similar, avoiding cookies and you can know this so far better than me.

Anyway, I don’t know what else to do or say at this point, I think that I wasted enough your time, so, I’ll be happy if you find a solution but understand if you prefer don’t use resources for this.

Thanks a lot for your assistance

Marco