[Domainer Zone]

I'm getting plenty of replies, but not very many new topics. This one guy talks to me on MSN Messenger and wanted me to sign up to a forum that pays 12 cents a thread and 8 cents a reply.

How about something like a 2:3 ratio for PostFusion? One replies gives you +1 balance, but a new topic gives you +1.5. This could be annoying for people who do not care if they get replies or new topics. You could have some settings that would let us choose between 1:1, 1:2, or 2:3. Replies would always be one, but if you wanted to post a new topic, you'd get a little more. The settings would also let you take off the higher reward for topics when you no longer need them.

...I don't know. I just need more topics and less replies.

[LarryB]

Here's the thing with this type of request. Theoretically this could be done. The problem is that most forum packages store a post count only. So it increments the post count as the user makes posts so that it can save on performance. What this would mean is that in order for us to get the numbers in the pickup script we would have to do some number crunching. Basically doing a select to query all the threads started by this user and counting them and doing the same thing for posts. While this is not a big deal on a small forum say couple thousand threads or so, for a very large forum this presents a very large performance bottleneck. Especially with us hitting the script at any regular interval. The other problem that this creates is that the pickup script now becomes infinitely more complex and difficult to update for future forums. So in short I don't know that this would be a very good feature for us to add, but if there is interest we awibble and I can sit down and discuss the logistics of it and if it is feasible to do.

[Domainer Zone]

That is a good point. If you did the select on threads for thread starters, and then did a mysql_num_rows to get the number, you could just get the replie count based total posts - new threads.

Also, there probably won't be a lot of forums with several thousand threads joining a post exchange program. Hitting the forum at any interval might be an issue, but it only needs to do the queries for members of the forum that are subscribed members here at PostFusion. Even if 500 forums sign up, not everyone will join that one forum.

As for the pickup script, I have no idea.

[LarryB]

while that works the count aggregate function would be better performance wise than mysql_num_rows. The problem with mysql_num_rows is that it pulls the entire dataset to count the results. This is added overhead that is not experienced with the aggregate function COUNT(). It is something that we can talk about if there is more interest, but at the current time I'm not sure if this is a direction we would want to go.