GenderLife Forum: The Information Exchange

I think you are probably correct. Now you might want to propose a solution that circumvents the performance issue. Maybe a dynamic query as part of the drop down menu that appears when you click on a user's name and an update trigger to increment posting totals by user stored in a separate table?

No, I like it better this way. I think that there is a tendency to lend more credence to an individual's postings because of their post count, which is complete and total BS. The playing field is more level this way.

I like it better too but for entirely different reasons.

I agree totally !!

The post counter is also inaccurate; the user_posts integer in the php database (MySQL I suspect) simply ticks up on each user post. There isn't a function to -1 post from a user if a post has been deleted.
So if a user posts 30 times to a thread that gets deleted, those 30 posts are still counted, even though they no longer exist.
So no, it's not dynamic as such, it's a static value that is pulled from the db. The only query made to the db is "What's this user's user_post count?" not "Search for all posts by this user and return a value equal to the number of posts" (which would be much more accurate but would chug the site horribly).