What I currently have is a forum divided into multiple boards (much the PHPBuilder one). I have it set up so that each member of my website has separate data that says whether or not there are unread messages on each board, for them personally. To accomplish this, I made a "boards" table that listed each of the boards. I then made another separate table that had a row for each member, and a column for each board.
I'll be the first to say that this isn't a very good solution to the problem, since every time boards are added/removed the database structure has to be edited.
However, I can't seem to think of a better way to do it. What would be nice would be some kind of "multi-dimensional" table, but I've never heard of MySQL supporting something like that.
So, does anyone have any suggestions? I'd appreciate the help, as I can't haven't been able to come up with anything on my own.
