Best way to identify visited thread in forum

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Best way to identify visited thread in forum

foxfox

4:40 pm on May 23, 2007 (gmt 0)

for example, a forum like webmasterworld, e.g.

[webmasterworld.com...]

sometimes i visit a thread, then click `back`, and visit another thread and so on...

after many visits, i found that i am lost, i don't know if a threads i have visited or not

one of the solution is to use CSS a:visited style, so that I can track which threads I have visited

however, my designer is not very happy with that...it make the layout no consistent and look ugly if too many visited links...

so i want to ask, besides `visited`, which approach you think can balance the design layout & usablilty?

just share

jtara

5:22 pm on May 23, 2007 (gmt 0)

The "visited" style isn't very reliable anyway, as it relies on the user's cache. If the previous visit is no longer in the user's cache, the link will show in the unvisited style.

Better would be to keep track of visited threads in a database, and then use a style, icon, etc. to indicate visited threads. You will need to use a cookie if you want to do this for non-logged-in users.

Don't recall which one(s), but I believe that at least one popular BBS system supports small icons for visited threads, as I've seen this frequently.