Just reading again and noted Alex's comment about the clikies. It is something I adopted in the Annexe by looking here, again by trying to act on comments.

The UBB type boards try to have some means of calculating what is new since you last visited it. In the case of the forum I opted to start with, it used what is called a "Session Cookie" in ASP speak to try and track last visited but it didn't work too well - at least for me - it's "new" marking is unreliable.

The Mudcat system (which I nicked - just by observation here - as I liked it and cures the problem). It is in someways a cheat. A parameter that is not used (well I don't use it anyway and it seems to make no difference ommiting that part when giving a link to a thread here) is something like &messages=xxxx which is easily obtained by looking up the number of posts from from the database. The way it works is that the URL with the parameter that reflects the post number changes as new posts are added so your browser views it as a different link. It falls down on the odd ocassion a post is deleted but overall I like it.

Jon