BuddyPress.org

After reading the entire thread, I am going to have to say that Jeff has nailed this one. All of the solutions being offered are trying to work around a design flaw, instead of correct the flaw.

To fix this issue, or rather to re-design the threaded activity comment feature so that it will be extensible, there has to be a serious change to the thought process of how this component, and eventually how all components are designed in general.

WP seems to be built around this “buckets of data” concept, where you just kind of create a container for data, label it, and go get it later. All of these buckets of data are sometimes associated with lookup tables, and sometimes associated with meta data entries acting as a lookup key, and sometimes not even associated at all; they are COPIED. This type of design is also prevalent in BP.

It is such a bad idea to copy data, and then begin associating other records with the copy, I can’t hardly stop myself from smashing my monitor to bits over the thought of it.

At the point you begin to do this, you might as well stop using an RDBMS and go back to text files, because that is how it is being used, as a directory of files, not for normalized relational data.

I understand there is short time here, but the problem must be solved with a clever design to associate all of the records in the proper way so there is a strong foundation to build on. I’m sure it will still be necessary to cache the data WHEN QUERIED, and there is nothing wrong with caching data (or careful de-normalization) for optimizing. It is a huge mistake, however, to pre-cache associations and treat those “virtual” associations as a new record.

Think about it this way. If you are afraid to delete records from a cache table because it will cause permanent data loss, then you really messed up somewhere.

I am willing to help out with this, if there is a willingness to do the right thing, and not what is needed to git’r done yesterday.