[eluser]jedd[/eluser]
Add that to the list of reasons to avoid exercise.
I was quite confused early on, with my design, between watching (subscribe to a thread) and tracking (where we are up to in a thread). After the recent discussions here, I've been pondering this in that back-of-the-brain kind of way, and my latest epiphany is that I can provide the option 'ignore new messages' (okay, better wording required) for each thread, just next to, and exactly like the 'subscribe / unsubscribe to this thread' option that we all know and love. I'm guessing the best bet there is to put a maxint (is there a native function in MySQL to put in a max for a numeric column?) against that thread. I think - but will need to ponder more and do some tests - that these rows can also be deleted once the thread is locked, so I don't see it adding any additional cruft.
InsiteFX - I have an auth system, and just need to extrapolate it out now to include granularity for forum mods and the like. I've been cranking up some basic CSS as I've been going along, but aesthetics aren't my thing. I've mostly gone for a blue motif (sincerest form of flattery and all that) though I have a basic theming system in place, just haven't gone back to pretty-up much of my stylesheets - I did them more as a proof of concept for my member's theme selection code.
sunny85 - I wasn't trying to scare you off - I was genuinely interested what trade-offs you saw between date .v. message # as the indexing method there.
