Yea, so there's a little square on the right of the post listing. Maybe if you click on that, it takes you to the most recent post, eh?

I could do it in a way that when you visit the topic for the first time it will go to the first post but after that the link will bring you to the latest reply. Not sure about that, could be confusing. Ill play around with the idea in my head.

I was thinking on something along the way of Jeffrey's Laracasts forums built on esoTalk. But yeah, if a topic gets massive it'd be nice to just see the last unread post. Keep up the good work, mates!

@nickstr, that would require more storage, queries, and caching. We might want to try to come up with a solution that doesn't require stored values for each possible end point.

Yeah I guess it'd consume a bit to store where each user had read up to, in each thread. I'd even be happy enough with a link that jumped you to the latest post that occurred since your last visit to the forum - not perfect, but then it could just be based off a single timestamp stored in a cookie or whatever.

Shawn, laravel has a big community and sooner or later you will need to implement some advanced features, so better to do it sooner than later :P.

Anyway you dont have to store info for ALL threads, only store it for threads that user actually visited...Also would check how Simple Machines Forum does it since its the lightest and fastest forum software out there (or at least on of them).

As far as "better sooner than later", that's not really how we develop. We focus on one small set of problems at a time based on priority. We can't just start spamming features and do things just because it seemed like a good idea at the time. We don't have limited resources and every feature we add to the application makes additional feature additions more expensive.

That said, I also don't think it's a great idea to store every thread that a user visits unless we have a massively compelling reason.

I hate having to scroll through pages to get to the new post that I haven't read. So, I really would like to see a feature that jumps me to the first unread post.

Compelling reason to have this function is that it's user friendly and many people are used to this functionality.

Sure, I mean. Keep in mind this application as a development project. I understand that people are going to want a lot of features. I'm just trying to give realistic expectations. We just launched and we definitely are working to make the forum as usable as possible. But, it'll be an iterative process.

That said, I think it's a nice idea for functionality.

I'm sure most of us realize that this forum is still in development. So, that isn't an issue.

Maybe, you could post a thread asking for the most wanted functionality and let the community "vote" on them.

I don't think a democratic approach is in the best interest of anyone. This thread though, has made me better realize how to handle feature requests etc. We should let these ideas come up, people discuss them. And see what sticks in the minds of the users.

To the technicality of the feature:
In other forum engines visited topics usually stored in a cookie limited to a number/time, it shouldn't be high stress on the server performance wise, the traffic would get some change with more data on the cookies though.