Remember Last Viewed Comment

[gerg]

Title
Remember Last Viewed Comment

Short, concise description of the idea
Have LiveJournal remember the last viewed comment you saw in a thread.

Full description of the idea
This suggestion would have LiveJournal store the timestamp of the last comment you viewed, and then use that to tell you how many and what comments were new when you visited a thread again. The functionality would be similar to that of the LJ New Comments script by Paul Wright ( http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/2494 ), only the data would be stored server-side instead of forcing users to use one browser.

There would, of course, be an opt-out through the admin console, if you did not want LiveJournal to store this information (despite the fact that they can probably recreate it anyway through server logs). Additionally, for performance and privacy reasons, the data would expire after 14 days of you not going to that thread again.

Additionally, it would be possible to track last viewed comments by uniq if there isn't a user currently logged in, but that would have the side effect of other users of your computer would see which threads you've viewed.

When you revisited a thread, the site could color all comments that are new to you with a different color, or put a box around them, or (best of all) let you type in your own CSS if you wanted to, to style them.
An ordered list of benefits

• It will be easier to follow comment threads, which will result in more discussion on LJ
• It will make LiveJournal more competitive with other blog sites which offer this feature
• A server-side implementation of this feature makes far more sense than relying on client-stored data.

An ordered list of problems/issues involved

• Requires effort on the part of SUP
• Requires LiveJournal to store additional data on users' last-viewed comments in each post
• Some users might scream privacy violation (but this is a pointless argument, LiveJournal ALREADY knows what comment pages you're viewing.)