EXACTLY! Luckily this software is going away. That said -- have you looked at the table schema of phpBB?? It's not far from this at all! and many, many forums are using phpBB (open source software).

This forum software has been discontinued but in the mean time some of my programmers used these tables as guides to create their own!!! Lucky for me I've found some short little blurbs on normalization I've passed around to the coders.

I'd still like to speed that query up as I'm probably going to have to live with it for 6 months.

In the mean time my server is crashing & so I can't tweak the query cache to work better. sigh. I've got to bone up on linux, file systems and kernal sorts of parameters for linux. Not all that fun. But it should help me understand how to set up linux for a database server and how to tune it to prevent the dreaded too many open files error.

But we're having a bit of summer sunshine in SF (rather than the cold fog) so I'll start that next week. :)