fenway

Sorry, what?

Give me an example of such "loops".

Well, don't you necessarily need to know when each game was played?

The first argument to FIELD() should be ProductID.

How are we to know which ones are the "last 3"?

What errors are you getting?

You can use IF() inside SUM(). But you shouldn't get "name" like that.

What are you trying to do?

What part don't you follow?

You're missing the point -- MySQL isn't the problem.

Too general.

You'll need to add a where clause to select either (a) those without updates (i.e. b.id IS NULL) or (b) those with updates (a.date > b.date), not both. Alternatively, you could UNION these two result sets -- might be easier to read, and definitely faster for the optimizer.

You didn't read the post, did you? Use ORDER BY FIELD().

Well, you haven't told us where the sortorder column is.

Why are you using GROUP_CONCAT?

Why are you storing numbers as VARCHAR?

Yeah, I am using pbpbb so it will also mean would having to find the username without actually typing it in. (too complicated for me to understand) I don't know what that means.

If you want an order, store a sortorder value.

Don't blame MySQL -- Facebook uses MySQL, and they're not looking for alternatives.

Define "special charaters".

Well, a LEFT JOIN will fix the "no updates" problem -- and just drop the group_concat all together.

Well, you'll need table to assign items to lists, and lists to people.

If you mean storing an image in the DB, I'd recommend against it, unless you have a really good reason.

If you have a table called player_game, each player_id should only appear once, correct? That's a UNIQUE constraint.

Never use short tags.