blowdart said:
HumanCompiler said:
*snip*
Bad Erik! Bad! (and fix that "In reply to bug"!)

I know mark all in forum as read would be a scalability nightmare; but a single page of topics can't be that bad can it?
Not that bad at first.  Until everyone's been using the feature for a year and then we're back to the same problem.  Wink

There actually IS a solution to the problem.  Well, sort of, anyway, but it involves quite a bit of work.  Basically, we'd have to take the total number of posts and the total number of threads you've marked as read and see if you have more than half read or more than half unread and then flip the meaning (for you) in our database.  Then mark all as read actually becomes a performance GAIN because only records for posts you've marked as unread will be in there.  I did build it in a way that makes it so we don't have to rewrite everything to enable this, but it's still a fair bit of work (and testing).

How to efficiently deal with large lists of data was actually an interview question I got here at Microsoft (the 2nd [out of 3] time I interviewed).  Fun stuff.