How to Mark Topics as Unread?

Digitalam

Hi! I've noticed Flarum creates a row in a DB whenever a user clicks on a discussion, and then compares timestamps to determine the unread/read status.

I'm curious to whether will it scale well if there are huge numbers of active users in a forum? And is this the most optimum way to do it?

luceos

Digitalam I'm curious to whether will it scale well if there are huge numbers of active users in a forum? And is this the most optimum way to do it?

Only one row for the currently active user is loaded per discussion on each request. So in terms of loading times the impact (especially due to some recent performance changes) is low. As for the number of rows, MySQL is very capable to handle millions upon millions of rows. And identifying any performance bottlenecks in the database is fairly straightforward, so scaling the database up should not pose too much of an issue should your community attract that much attention.

ram0ng1

See https://extiverse.com/extension/blomstra/mark-unread

composer require blomstra/mark-unread:"*"
php flarum cache:clear

Digitalam

luceos Interesting! So that means if there are 10 discussions per page, only 10 rows will be loaded then?

luceos

Digitalam the read marker state is only loaded for the currently logged in user.

Obviously if anyone builds an extension that "lists how far how many users have read a certain discussion", all rows of the current discussion are read to create counts. This is the power and the risk of the extensibility that is Flarum.

Digitalam

Ah, I see. Thanks!

luceos

luceos Obviously if anyone builds an extension that "lists how far how many users have read a certain discussion", all rows of the current discussion are read to create counts.

Or better yet, each post data would be enriched with a count how many users have read until that post. So this would still be a smaller subset than the complete table. The subset would be based on the number of markers for the discussion and this post.