Threaded/Nested Messaging

I am not sure what exactly you mean.

Do you mean you have a table with, say, articles and another table with comments on articles?
In this case you will have a field article_id in your article table and one article_id in your comments table.
So all you do is make a query like this

select * from articles, comments where articles.article_id=comments.article_id

Ah. That was the other interpretation that I hoped wasn't it

An easier way to solve this would be:
Forget about the auto-increment.
Get the highest ID before insertion, add 1 and give this id to the new entry for the ID field and the parent field if it's the first in thread. The replies will get that id as parent as well. So all comments in one threads have the same parent ID. Clear?

Now you can use one query, sort by parent and id.
For each row, keep the last id and parent for comparison.
Then create a variable for the padding space.
Now, if in one row the new parent is the ID of the last row then you know you have to add another padding divs to your output.
As long as the parents stay identical keep the number of padding divs.
If the next parent is different without being the id of the previous row then substract one padding div.

Now, ain't that easy?

OK OK, I'll try to write it down but don't blame me if it doesn't work 100%, it's just a sample for what I mean

//Get the highest id
$highest= $db->query("SELECT max(id) as MAXID FROM comments");
$mm = $db->fetch_assoc($highest);
$max = ($mm['MAXID'] + 1);
// Insert one row with a thread starter
$newrow = $db->query("insert into comments (id, parent, text) values (" . $max .", " . $max . ", '" . $text . "'");

//Now get the threads
$all = $db->query("select * from comments order by parent, id");
$padwidth = 8;
while ($sb = $db->fetch_assoc($all)){
  if($all['parent'] == $oldid)  {
    $padwidth += 8;
    $oldparent = $all['parent'];
    }
  elseif($all['parent'] != $oldparent)  {
    $padwidth -= 8;
    }
  echo '<div style="padding-left:' . $padwidth . 'px;">' . $text;
  $oldid = $all['id'];

  
}

Something like this. No warranty. Just a rough sketch...

It didn't really work... I think your code was supposed to have $sb instead of $all in the loop. I'm needing one that threads them in such a way that there can be more than one comment on a single level. I think this can only be achieved with a recursive function... is there anything wrong with having over 40 queries? Probably...

This is difficult since I have a nested comments script that works, but the only problem is the number of queries.

Tobi, if you can come up with one that doesn't use a crapload of queries and still is completely functional (with ordering ASC and DESC by date) perhaps I can offer you something for it.

CREATE TABLE `newcomments` (
  `id` int(100) NOT NULL default '0',
  `parent` int(100) NOT NULL default '0',
  `text` text NOT NULL,
  `date` int(150) NOT NULL default '0',
  PRIMARY KEY  (`id`)
) TYPE=MyISAM;

I had earlier removed the entries, but it would seem that it's easy to insert new ones.

I've since changed the script, but I suppose I can get some sample entries. Just to clarify, you would like 20 to 30 sample entries to test with?

Ok, I will create those and get back to you.