Create a class (or ID) for forums/tags with unread messages

TB54

Hello everyone,

I try to make my tag page more useful, as for now its only value is to show all the sub-category unfold. A good addition would be the possibility to indicate, on this tag page, which forum have unread discussions (it would also make a compromise with the traditional forum view functioning, which had this role in phpBB).

But here I have a problem : there is nothing I see in the class or ID of the .TagTile-children a which could be used to target the ones which have unread messages.

Once we have this class or ID, we can do anything, like using bubble icons for unread messages:

Or if the sub-tags already have icons, underlining the forums with unread messages:

... or whatever, once it's CSS anything is possible.

Note that I understand well that all that would be more messy with the default tag-page layout of flarum (where the sub-tag follow each other on the same line), but it would be nice to have this possibility.

So I guess my question is: is there a simple way to create a class or ID for the unread forums? Being a total newbie beyond CSS, I have no idea if it would just mean a simple line of javascript in the header (if targeting unread forum already exists, there is just to associate a class to it I guess?), or if it would need a complete new extension.

clarkwinkelmann

TB54 Flarum has natively no ability to tell which tags contain unread messages in them.

Flarum only stores a global "read all" timestamp, and the read status of each individual discussion.

An extension would require PHP code to either dynamically retrieve the read status of each tags (very resource intensive, bad for performance), or it would require additional database columns and events listeners (to store the number of unread discussions in each tag for each user). Even this second option would need to be ideally coupled with an async queue for optimal performance on larger forums as it would create a lot of write operations on the database every time a user reads a discussion.

A slightly more performant operation could be to only store the date of the last reply for each tag, and the last read time for each user per tag. This would remove the need to perform a query on all discussions of each tag every time a user reads anything on the forum. This solution can't tell how many unread discussions or messages are in a tag however. And might not properly work if not all users can see the same discussions in a same tag.

EDIT: a client-side solution could be to only retrieve whether the last discussion of a tag has been read by the user. Since the last discussion is already loaded as a relationship of each tag. It's probably not fool-proof though, for example if the last updated discussion was ignored by the user it might always show as either read or unread. And if a message has been deleted from the last updated discussion it would probably show something wrong as well.

TB54

clarkwinkelmann Ok thanks a lot for the very complete explanation! That's seem indeed very complicated and heavy...

It's a detail, but to understand well, when a phpBB forum shows that there are unread messages in one of it's forum, it's the same kind of heavy operation? That slows them down?