I like that idea. Now I always have to change this into approx 24hrs since I visit Mantis once every day.

the problem is tracking the last login. It's easy if you actually log out and in each time. But many people (myself included) keep the login cookie stored and so don't actually log in each time. Also, you'd really want to do it since you last logged out, otherwise you'd see all the changes you made after logging in marked as new the next time.

I don't know if we want to add a DB write on every page load to mark the current time...

It doesn't have to be written in a table; it can be written to a cookie too. On every page-check of the view_all_bug_page, a cookie (last_view_time_cookie) is written with the current time. When last_update > last_view_time_cookie the date is written in bold.

To improve it, 2 cookie-times can be kept: last_view and recent_view.
If recent_view < current-time - 1 hr (or something like that) then last_view = recent_view

(If we don't do it this way, we only get to see the bold dates for 1 view, until last_view_time is bigger then all the last_update times)

jfitzell,
I got this idea in rememberance of an existing database field "last_visit", which exists in mantis 0.17.5 in table "mantis_user_table". I'm not sure, when this field gets written (on login or logout). But it can be read on login and the filter can be set accordingly. Morely there can be an info in the page head, when the last visit happens.
If someone didn't login/logout every time this doesn't work correctly, but if someone don't logout, he will work daily with mantis.
The solution from jowouters seems to work in every way - as I understand.

The problem with the cookie approach is that when I view stuff at home and then go to work it looks like everything I looked at at home is new, when in fact it isn't. And I don't buy the argument that people who store their login use it every day. I definitely don't use it everyday and I store my login just because I don't consider it very high security and don't feel like typing in a password every time I click on a link in a bug email.

Is it that expensive to mark the time on each 'view all bugs'? Currently we are doing 10's of queries per page. Would it be that painful to have a table of userid and login time? I know that packages like nuke do (or did at one time) something like this for tracking the number of users/anonymous users accessing the system. Nuke certianly is installed on systems with very high user counts.

closing: exact notion of "last visit" versus "last login" and cookies versus database not clear -- reopen or report again with more specific use case if this is still important