Hello Milo

After some time I want to come up with some thoughts. There are four ways of handling the amount of stored read entries.

1. Limit the number of entries.
2. Limit the age of entries.
3. Remove entries when they going to be locked.
4. The info about who reads which entries will be stored permanently.

For the ways one to three we have implemented settings. The settings for the first and third way existed before our implementation. The setting for the second way came up with version 2.4. All this ways are able to interfere one with each other. A busy forum member will probably hit the number limit, a "lazy" forum user, who reads every when and then in only a few threads, will with a higher chance run into the age limit, if both ways are activated in the settings.

This is IMHO an inconsistent behaviour. Additionally there is no clear way to decide between the ways of read-state-handling.

I propose the (more or less complete) unification of the settings. First I propose a switch between the four possible ways (read_state_expiration_method, values 0 to 3 (methods: off, number, date, locking)). The settings max_read_items and read_state_expiration_date can be shrinked to read_state_expiration_value. Only the fourth method (remove read state when locking) would need a combination of the native setting for auto locking (days until locking) and independent from that the setting to remove the read state (or not or handle it in another way).

The settings should be neighbours in the settings form. You can inspect a draft for the handling of the several settings in my repo, branch readstateswitch, functions.inc.php lines 92 ff., 105 ff. and 218 f..

What's your opinion?

Tschö, Auge