An idea for webpublishers into news based services who utilizes cookies in identifying users could be to also use the cookie to display to the user only the items, eg. news articles etc., which haven´t been displayed to the user yet, ie. the ones which are still new to him. How often do you want to read some news based stuff twice? Even browsing over it? Of course there should always be an option to view the whole shit. This could be on a daily basis, or on a weekly basis - like "Dont´show be stuff I´ve read before during this week". Concerning system usage, well, the ads you get are generated in a similar way via cookies (using server CPU), so why not give the user some real value from slipping him cookies?-- badger, Dec 06 2000 ClariNet http://www.clari.netClariNet offers news on usenet, some providers buy it. Newsreaders do what you want. [rrr, Jun 25 2002, last modified Oct 04 2004] Halfbakery's system is smart (and with a good design), my target was primarily newspapers, message boards - they should be more like halfbakery - and have a priority between new/old (since last visit) and read/unread. Maybe the view should be changeable like option settings in a newsgroup browser ('show all', 'show unread', maybe 'expand', etc.) Heh, newspapers should be like newsgroups! publishing both in web- and news-protocol. Also, Halfbakery could be a newsgroup, having in addition a website with the accumulated and/or edited material.-- badger, Dec 06 2000 For a news service, why not use an nntp-based news server instead of a web server? Newsreaders typically keep track of which articles you've read.-- baf, Jul 06 2001 Indeed, I've often wished for a news service that threaded its articles, like usenet news does. If I don't care about a story, I should be able to mark it, and all future articles about the same story, as read. Or if I'm interested, I want all of the follow-up articles to be highlighted, even if they're the electronic equivalent of a single paragraph at the bottom of page 12.-- wiml, Jul 06 2001 random, halfbakery