Is there some way to tell a browser "mark these links as viewed" even though the user's browser never went to those links? I want to take advantage of the browsers own link coloring scheme (visited/not visited) to help in a forum system.

Hrm, <a style="visited" ...> should work, IIRC.

wow

Hrm, <a style="visited" ...> should work, IIRC.

Yea I know. But that would require me to keep track of the visited links. I just wanted to know if theres a way to somehow tell the browser to "add this page to your database of viewed links ... even though you never displayed this page." I'm trying to avoid any complicated scheme for keeping track of who of thousands of visitors visited which of thousands of posts.

First off, that should be class="visited".

Second, if you have defined colour classes for each type of link (active, link, visited, hover) then the browser will display the appropriate colour based on the class attribute.

For example,

<style type="text/css">
A.Visited { color: #FF0000; background-color:transparent; }
</style>
[...]
<a class="Visited" href="/wherever/">Some link</a>.