Customizing SMF > SMF Coding Discussion

About SMF 4 messengers

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asmith:
Hello,

This has made me curious. Why SMF keeps 4 columns in members table for messengers? SMF normally stores these types of info in themes table which is more efficient and more flexible. (Which is being used by custom profile fields)
Other than sorting purposes in memberlist page (which IMHO is not important and if it is for having some kinds of statistics, it can be done via themes table too), is there any other reason why giving 4 individual fields for 4 messengers? In many SMF forums out there many of these fields are left empty. Any idea?

Arantor:
Mostly because you can search on those things - and I don't believe you can apply member search to custom fields at this point in time.

asmith:
Yea I missed messenger search! Thanks :)

MrPhil:
I agree that having 4 dedicated fields to 4 specific messengers is probably a bad design. Not only is it a waste of space when not used, but what happens when those four fall out of favor and things like Facebook and Twitter become more popular? If I were doing this over again, I'd probably have multiple "messengers" (whatever that covers in this day and age) all lumped into one large "Social Media" field, with some sort of keyword and separator to indicate which is which. This would permit a Messenger Search, too, although it might not be quite as efficient as today.

Arantor:
Do remember, though, when they were originally added, the likes of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter simply did not exist. That's how far back we're going with them...

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