For an excellent guide to using your myfreeforum forum, you can visit howtodoit
The howtodoit "readonly" forum provides answers and walkthroughs for all common questions.
Any database schema needs a lot of thought if it is to be optimal. I have been reading a fair bit on how the various versions of phpbb have wavered backwards and forwards on some of the issues!
With myfreefriends though, there is clearly a flaw in using either the joomla/phpbb2 approach to storing user information. Both these products have essentially one record per user, so that record is a big one.
This is probably not entirely optimal for a forum, but at least on a forum the number of users is limited and xprofile fields not withstanding there is only a limited amount of information we store on a user.
A social networking type system is of a different order of magnitude, we would expect to have hundreds of thousands of users and we would expect users to store a considerable amount of profile information.
Hence the idea will be to have a lean mean user record joining to perhaps a few other user record types that will only be loaded when that information is actually needed.
The whole messaging issue requires some interesting choices storage wise.
Some of those choices are bad, like for example a choice of one myasm table per user for their messages has certain attractions, like for example only loading data for the user when they are online and active. Where this breaks down is myasm tables are stored one to a file and all files in a single directory, you could end up with a million files in a directory quite easily That is really not a good idea.
Now that one is a sort of pitfall that might catch a novice, but there really are a lot of issues here.
The way through them though is the old programming trick of abstraction. We abstract the general database layer so we can switch to another type of database, and at a higher level we work with some kind of messaging/chat class, that class itself abstracts how the information is stored.
Therefore if push comes to shove, the database can be converted to another format and just a little code changed and things will be back working.
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That is really not a good idea.
