Hey guys, I’ve just submitted a plugin to the WordPress repository that should cover the basic functionality you’re after. Here’s the description:

== Description ==

bbPress Go To First Unread Post is a literally named plugin that allows registered users to jump to the first Reply in a Topic that they haven’t viewed yet. This gives your bbPress forum the simple and expected functionality of non-WordPress counterparts like phpBB, without a lot of coding.

First, you activate the plugin on a blog that already has the bbPress plugin enabled. This is all you need to do to activate the basic functionality of the plugin, which includes:

* Automatic tracking of last reply viewed, per topic per user.
* Link next to the title of a topic if the user has unread posts (between the title and pagination)

The plugin also includes two template tags for extra functionality:

* Mark Topics as Read link
* Mark Forum as Read link

I’ll post again here with a link when it’s been approved!

http://wordpress.org/plugins/bbpress-go-to-first-unread-post/

[@robin-w Moderator 10 years, 8 months ago]

Great – look forward to seeing it !

[@conundrum89 Participant 10 years, 8 months ago]

Here it is!

bbPress Go To First Unread Post

I hope this suits your needs, guys. If there’s something that doesn’t work or you’d like added, you can let me know here or send me an email through the Plugin page.

Please consider donating if you enjoy it! 🙂

[@netweb Keymaster 10 years, 8 months ago]

Nice, will take a look a closer look later 🙂

[@pjtna Participant 10 years, 7 months ago]

Thanks, looks like a great plugin Matthew.

I am yet to try it out on my website. I know in the past there were issues with this type of plugin in terms of scalability. My forum is by no means large (2000+) but I am already starting to have server issues. Could you tell me if this plugin is ok for larger forums?

[@conundrum89 Participant 10 years, 7 months ago]

Hi Tanya,

I am yet to try the plugin on what I would call a “large” forum, but I wouldn’t think it would cause issues – it queries and writes to one usermeta variable each time a user visits a topic with new replies, and reads from a few usermeta variables when displaying a list of topics. As long as you have appropriate pagination, I wouldn’t expect to see any significant performance impact.

If you do install the plugin, I’d very much appreciate it if you can let me know how it goes – whether you experience any issues at all, so that I can see about making it more efficient if necessary. And of course, if there are issues with the server, you can always disable the plugin again to restore previous performance.