Thread:Mathmagician/@comment-93604-20120509230753/@comment-3508190-20120513124212

Yeah. That naming scheme isn't all that intuitive. I made the same mistake. :)

I only just started to write the code to detect unread messages, so there's nothing to show yet, but it's probably better if I lay out my ideas before committing them to code. We need some way to persistently store a few things:


 * 1) the timestamp of the last visit to the page
 * 2) the plonked users
 * 3) the collapsed threads
 * 4) the collapsed posts

(sorted by order of relevance)

If this tool catches on, we should write some PHP code that adds this stuff to the user's preferences, but in the short term that's not an option. Getting a MediaWiki extension excepted by Wikia Staff will take quite a bit of convincing, I imagine. And it's further complicated by the fact that there's no such thing as per-user extension. There's only per-wiki extensions. So we would have to convince Staff to enable this globally - for all wikis. I don't see that happening any time soon.

So in the short run we will have to make do with cookies. My suggestion would be to create a global cookie that would contain only the plonk-data, if anything. And a local cookie - local both to the wikia, but also to wgPageName. This second cookie would contain the timestamp of the last visit, the IDs of the collapsed threads and maybe also the IDs of the collapsed posts.