What would I have to learn to start working on a filter?

I don't want this to get lost and I am dead serious. What does someone need to know? I am ready to ask favors of people I know. I am ready to start learning stuff at night and on weekends.

mySQL and PHP.

msbelle, are you a coder at all? If you're not, it's probably not a good place to start. At all.

I'm not, only done a teeny tiny bit of HTML. But! I know people. Lots of them in fact. Wasn't someone's hubby doing some stuff at some point? Would bringing in someone be allowed?

Burrell's DH is on the list. But we're kinda stalled right now, lacking a bit of organisation and a central code repository. Jon and I have worked out how to work around each other, but it's not a system that can support other people.

If anyone else can volunteer to host a CVS system, we don't need to wait for Karl to get free time that we will then steal from him.

If anyone else can volunteer to host a CVS system

What does this mean?

Is it logical to discuss the underlying code, just speculatively, here?

I mean, if we were all allowed to MARCIE just one other person, it'd be easy, because showthread.php could just get a clause like:

if($poster == $marcied_poster){ next; }

or whatever, but presumably we get more than one?

So we need a new joining-table of some kind? A table like

MARCIE-erMARCIE-eeJohn HRebecca Lizard

(if I were ever to MARCIE Rebecca) only with numbers of course?

What does this mean?

CVS is a code versioning software that runs (primarily, I think) on Unix boxes, and allows pretty granular control and status info that allows a distributed team of programmers to work together with minimal shedding of blood and loss of code with stomping on.

And yes, John, it would work like that. We didn't pick a maximum number of filters/user, and we have designed the in-thread look of the feature, but there'll also need to be a page where you can see a list of who you've marcied and be able to unblock them.

My SQL abilities are my weak point, so bear with me -- what about an array variable in the user table? So for every userid, there would be an open ended array. Whenever a user MARCIEd someone, the MARCIE-ee would get appended to the array. Then the code would check if $poster was contained in the array for that user.

I (and John will bear me out, once he stops laughing or rolling his eyes) am Normalisation's bitch. And what John proposed is precisely normal -- relationships other than one-to-one should have their own table. Your suggestion is how I'd represent the data inside the PHP object, but when I have a little less of a pounding headache maybe I can explain to you why it's less good for the underlying structure.

Which isn't supposed to sound condescending or dismissive, but I fear it may.

I shoulda just typed "BECAUSE IT'S WRONG!!!", shouldn't I?