fenway

I don't understand what the output is supposed to look like.

Full-text searching will ignore any keywords that match more than 50% of the records.

Technically, CHAR(0) is the smallest you can use for storing booleans.

I highly doubt that's true.

Then PHP doesn't know about the correct access credentials.

Echo the query.

No -- never a VARCHAR for a DATE.

Ignoring the obvious security issues here, I assume you have a session with their current username.

Well, first things first -- that's not a normalized DB. You have repeated category columns. Second, as a result, the first multi-table query won't be able to use a proper index, so it will be VERY slow.

Who set this up?

Well, there are 4 options: 1) both start/end are are before your date range 2) both start/end are are after your date range 3) start is before, end is during/after 4) start is during, end is during/after 1 & 2 are good... 3 & 4 are overlaps.

Better yet, store these properly as UNSIGNED INTs.

If you want "latest", you'll need a timestamp somewhere.

You're storing your dates how?

I don't see any SQL statements there.

Everything can affect performance. Show us both statements, table structures, and EXPLAIN output for both.

You can check EXPLAIN output to ensure proper index usage... but worry about scalability issues later.

OR SET days_old = days_old + INTERVAL 1 DAY.

This sounds like a fundamental php question.

You'll need to use ORDER BY and LIMIT 100, and then run that in a sub-select for RAND().

Ellipses can be funny.

You can't have user_id in there with group by like that.

And what does SHOW FUNCTION STATUS tell you?

Well, if you have the date range, you simply need to check in any db record overlaps.

I don't know... how much text in on an A4 page?