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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-15T16:05:34+00:00

I am trying to build a simple randomised voting system for a site, currently,

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I am trying to build a simple randomised voting system for a site, currently, and I believe wrongly, I have the following setup

as the user goes to the random voting section of the site, he is presented with a votable item that firstly, is an item that was last voted on the longest time agp, Secondly, isn’t something the user voted for before and thirdly must be relevant to them based upon their list of relevant subjects. As a side note, if the user skips the vote, it can’t show them the same thing again later in the list and all the single votes must be recorded to produce statistics.

Currently, the way I am doing this is by holding a serialized array against their account in the database containing a list of vote item Id numbers that they have previously voted for.
I would like to say at this point that I don’t condone this, and inserting a serialized array into the database was silly, and I regret my actions 😉 .

Nevertheless, I couldn’t figure out another way to do this. at this point, the array is built upon by users voting which adds to the list. but the query would become massive if I was to continue and someone had up to 100 things they could vote for. At this point I am using this query to get the next item in the list:

//$finarr is the received unserialized list of values from the database

$sql = "SELECT * FROM vote_item_headers WHERE Id NOT IN (".$finarr.") ORDER BY LastVoted DESC LIMIT 1"

//execute query and display results

I should also note that at this point, I haven’t even bothered adding in the third requirement above because frankly, I didn’t even know where to begin or anything when I had to make a query that needed to encompass all of the requirements above.

A bit more information you might find relevant:
I have some other tables which are explained below.

core_users = list of users and their interests
core_interests = a list of all interests
core_language = a list of the different possible languages that an item could fall into
vote_item_headers = a list of all the votable items with a reference in the interests and lang tables to define extra properties of the votable item.
core_votes = the master list of people’s votes

I am really sorry if this is too vague for you guys, all I really want is guidance in this instance when dealing with large amounts of information that needs to be combined to get a result.

Any suggestions welcome. I am happy to restructure the entire thing just to get it right.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    voted

    user_id   | Id
----------+------
    1     | 12
    1     | 14
    1     | 187
    2     | 23

SELECT * FROM vote_item_headers 
    WHERE Id NOT IN (
        SELECT Id FROM voted WHERE user_id=1234
    ) 
    ORDER BY LastVoted DESC LIMIT 1

    but you also want relevant posts

    relevant_posts

    user_id   | Id
----------+------
    1     | 342
    1     | 253
    1     | 32
    2     | 53

SELECT vote_item_headers.* FROM vote_item_headers 
    # cut down the amount returned with relevant_posts table
    INNER JOIN relevant_posts ON (
        vote_item_headers.Id=relevant_posts.Id
        AND user_id=1234
    ) 
    WHERE vote_item_headers.Id NOT IN (
        SELECT Id FROM voted WHERE user_id=1234
    ) 
    ORDER BY LastVoted DESC LIMIT 1
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