Bumping threads in a forum... how?

[Avochelm]

Hi, I'm just thinking out how I am going to do this, and I'm hoping some people will give me some pointers on how to change the orde of things in a database. Eg:

How would I top a thread? Would I do a sort by date thing or what? and if so how do you sort by date instead of id as my date strings look like: d-m-Y?

[bubblenut]

Well your date order is wrong. I'd suggest writing a script which gets the unique_id and the date on every row in the table, converts the date into a proper form (a unix timestamp or directly into a MySQL timestamp) and stores them in a file. Then alters the table such that the date column is a MySQL timestamp, or prehapse a date (or prehapse add another column and have both) then for every line in the file, do an UPDATE on the column to the new value of date.
I can hear you screaming "What the hell do I want to do all that hastle for!!" and if you've got more than a trivial number of messages on your forum "That's gonna take ages and kill my DB!!" both true, but the benifits, in terms of ease of use, it will give you in the long run will outway the hastle, I promise. However, it will hammer your DB for quite a while if you've got a large number of messages so pick a time when you're likely to have low traffic.
HTH
Bubble

[Avochelm]

Hi, thanks for your response. There are no messages in the forum, it's still in alpha atm on my localhost. What format of date do you suggest and how would I sort the array by it? I'm assuming I should change the date to a Ymd format?