This is merely a discussion thread more than anything. Playing around lately with Ajax, and learning how it works for real time applications, it made me start to think about real time forums. Then it made me think about how to achieve a forum system where you can actually see people responding.. in real time. The idea is simple. When a user is posting, it would create a temporary file. Username.threadid.date.txt The in-> would allow users to be typing in real time to save ever say 10 seconds and update the txt file. Since everything would be txt files already, it would be easy to make a flat file based system off this.. the out<- would be simple also. As a user finished, it would post the threadpost, and the txt loaded would be implied and inherited like so: username.threadid.date.#.txt the above file would be relative based on the idea of incremental file numbers. test.1.nov609.1.txt, test2.1.nov609.2.txt, etc. Usinc an array sorter, you could create something to arrange top down, up down post sort, based on striping file names and sorting high to smaller numbers. Need to search for a user, str srch the first part of the file name, date, 3rd part... So Ajax based forums... anyone up for the challange, debate.
I don't think people want to respond in real time like that. But if people really want that then you can make a mod to an existing forum that integrates that function in pretty easily, without having to write the whole thing and you won't have to write your own database structure for it. If people half-write a response then leave the page it's going to get cluttered pretty quickly.