This blog is mainly me figuring out a MYSQL problem. I came up with a solution, but me saying it to myself will help me to see if I did it right. This is for the "Player Feed", which will appear on the index of my website, http://alertgames.net , for registered users when im done.

If you can take anything from this, yay!

What i have:

An option for all members: "Who can see your activity?"

-People who have added you as a friend

-Only people you also have added as a friend

-Nobody can see my activity

What i need:

When showing the feed, address the above.

The feed contains entries of:

-Posting a blog (New blogs are only allowed every 12 hours)

-Getting a highscore in a game (if you have a score, compare)

-Getting achievements in a game (only put a new entry every 24 hours or so)

-Hosting a match

How to going about it:

At first, I was thinking of cross referencing every user of their choice of their privacy option. This would require going through each individual member's choices, then deciding who out of the people that added you should see your posts. In database world, this would mean searching for all people you have added, search all those you found in the user table, and then build an array of people to pull feed entries from, and search the feed table for them.

However, that much work on the server for every time someone visits the home page is a bit much. Instead, I thought of a better way:

How i might do it instead:

Instead of having to pull up the users table, I can store their option in 2 places. Once in the user table, so that it will remember the person's answer if they go into their preferences. The other can be stored in each entry of the friends table. The only downfall of this is that every time you update your option, you have to update each entry of the friends table. But this shouldn't be much of a problem since you will probably not do that often.

Now that the option is stored in the friends table, you have to look at what option they chose. First search all users that you have added on your friends list, and disregard any of them that chose not to have their activity shown. For those who chose the default first option, thats all there is to it.

The problem comes in when you both need to be friends in order to see the post. You don't want to have to make individual queries for each individual person, so I think the best way, would to build up an array of users to check, and before displaying the entries on your feed double check with one query for each of the people with this option. (using a WHERE IN() ). I may play it safe and make the limit like 5 more, incase this happens.

Finally, the feed can be displayed and does all that shinanigans.

Any ideas on another way to do this? Or is it pretty good? Hope this contributed to something lol :D