Couple of questions (Cookies and forums)

Deposeni

Okay, as some of you may know - I'm working on a forum... and a web-based RPG (Forum is for RPG)...

What I want to know is - should I continue using Session's, or switch to cookies using md5 now while I still have the chance.

Also: How do forums like phpbb, figure post counts? My friend said they don't use "Add 1 for every topic created" method anymore, because that had too many problems... So what do they use? "On the fly"? Figuring the post count whenever someone visits index.php? Wouldn't that lag?

Does anyone know?

Rayn

1: Use both, session are very good for user tracking, and cookies would be good for user info like md5() password and userid.

2: What do you mean? The amount of user posts? The amount of views per page?

Deposeni

User posts, like instead of adding 1 to the user's Post Count every time he/she makes a post... Make it look through the messages and replys, and then add all of the posts made by the same user together, than add that number to the user accounts... So if I delete a post from MySQL, and forget to update the other tables - it'll do it for me the next time someone visits index.php (The forum listing)

Edit: My friend said all of the bigger forums out there, don't actually add to the user's post count... they figure the post count "On the fly"... So I'm just wondering what that means.

laserlight

That's what is meant by "on the fly":
to obtain a count of all the user's posts when it is requested.

this method is very accurate, but tends to be database intensive.

updating a post count can be faster (or rather less expensive), but needs to be periodically re-synchronised with the actual (i.e. on the fly) count, especially for large and active forums.

Deposeni

So I should keep my current method (Add when a post is made) but also add some code to index.php, so whenever that page is visited - it goes through, checks the posts and compares them to the user ID - then re-calcuates them?

RedDragon

you need to decide for one method, else it might slow down your script!