Once a month message

corblimey

For my site, I'm doing a deploy once a month, and I'm thinking of letting users know what's been changed when I've done it. So I'll pop up a little message on their dashboard which they can keep or dismiss as necessary. Normally, I'd use a little cookie for this, no problem. However, since I want them to be able to see the new message the following month, I can't think of any way around this other than unique cookies every month. I'm not sure I want to clutter my users' pc with cookies like that (okay, it'll be small, a boolen value or something, but if they examine cookies in a year's time, it might look bad that I've got 12 extra cookies, on top of the usual ones they need).

Maybe I'm worrying over nothing, and it does appear to be the easiest way to do this, but is there a better way that I'm missing?

ETA: this is a PHP site.

Placebo

You could just use simple php to show a new message everymonth,
you could do the flagging with a database [for each user]

I wouldnt use cookies for something like this [what if they have them turned off, or clean their web history etc]

corblimey

Tks Placebo, a db approach never occured to me.

Creamy Goodness

depends how many people are going to see it?

Imagine doing writes to a db for every visitor that visits boards.ie home page?

Have a look at stackoverflow they do this kind of message stuff and they use cookies afaik.

corblimey

Well I'm fairly sure boards does just that to record my last visit, what's changed since then, etc.

bobbytables

corblimey wrote: »

Well I'm fairly sure boards does just that to record my last visit, what's changed since then, etc.

That would probably be more storage/schema efficient than tracking a Boolean flag for each user. Especially if you're already tracking last login time.