I haven't looked at a line of the PM code, so please tell me to shut up when I go out of line.

Let's change subscription to watching. What about the following design:

• Every node knows about its parent.
• Every node would have a list of watchers associated with it. This list would be taken from the Personal Nodelet of each Monk.
• If a reply is made to a node, all watchers would have their personal nodelet updated to have an asterisk (or similar notification) put to it. Basically, a flag would be set in the Personal Nodelet table for each monk.
• The watching of a post and its descendents would be implemented by having a user be a watcher on every single post. And, when a reply is made, that monk would become a watcher on the new post automagically. The trick is to make sure that the right spot in the Personal Nodelet is updated.
• So, you could do the following table:

  Thread_Watching
  ---------------
  Node_Id
  Monk_Id
  Nodelet_Id
  [download]

  And, if a reply is made to that node, then that Nodelet_Id is updated. If the Node_Id != the Nodelet_Id, then the monk must be watching the whole thread, so add that monk to the new node's Thread_Watching entries.

I have no idea how much work that would take, and I can't provide a huge amount of coding help (4 kids), but I'll help as much as I can ...

------
We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

The idea is a little like C++ templates, except not quite so brain-meltingly complicated. -- TheDamian, Exegesis 6

Please remember that I'm crufty and crochety. All opinions are purely mine and all code is untested, unless otherwise specified.

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