Someone brought up a good point regarding old signatures, so here's what I'll do.
On my to-do list (about 4 or 5 items down) is "Strip signatures out of old messages that contain them directly in the message."
That'll make both our message table and search catalogs a bit smaller.
But here's what I'll do instead.
I'll parse them before stripping them, so that when I'm done, I'll have a separate table called Signature_History or something like that, and it'll contain each signature-using user ID and each of the signatures they've used. Then it'll be fairly easy to incorporate that into profile editing so you can have multiple signatures and select any of them by checkbox whenever the mood strikes.
However, it'll still work such that whatever your CURRENT signature is, is the one that'll be displayed when anyone reads ANY of your messages.
Now I think I'll probably be spending the rest of the day finding the bugs in the new posting routine. I thought it was working well enough to put into production yesterday afternoon, so I did it, while watching trace output, then noticed some posts in the trace output that weren't showing up on the site, and later got an error message of my own when trying to post.
It'll really help the site when I get this running, though. Posting seemed to happen a LOT faster using the new routine, and the thing of dupe numbers should become a thing of the past.
Previously, assigning the post number (along with incrementing a post's reply count) happened very early in the process. And all of it was happening in ASP, so it was very easy for several people to overlap in the posting process, and if a part of it failed (usually the post-insert process, which is the heaviest part), the parts before that still succeeded, resulting in dupe message numbers and other incorrect things like incorrect total posts for a user, incorrect daily post counts, etc.
Now it's all or none. Well, is in development and soon will be in production. If any part of the process fails (which should be less likely to happen because of the greater speed), every part of it fails.
