Hello.
I am wanting to make a Forums board and before I start I am thinking about some things that I want to be able to do, but dont have a clue how to do them. I need to have diffrent groups and the user has to change groups automatically accordenly. For example this is what i was thinking about for my database table design:

[u]GroupID(PK)</u> | [u]GroupName</u> | [u]MinPosts</u> | [u]SpecialRank</u> | [u]Stars</u>
       1 Adminstration 0 Yes 5
       2 Adminstrator 0 Yes 5
       3 Newbie 0 No 0
       4 Adv. Member 50 No 2

And then in the Users table it would have a place to specify what Group they are in. The only problem is, when they have over 40posts they change groups. How would you have Access change that number automatically? Or is there a better way, or easier.... I am not THAT good at programming yet, so a example would be awsome!

There are two ways you could go with this.

1) When the person posts a new post, check the number of posts they've posted and, if needed, adjust their rank. So if a user just posted their 50th post, your code would detect that and change their status in the database.

2) The more common method is to write a function that calculates the person's rank each time it's requested. So if I just requested a post or profile by John Doe, a function like calcRank would be called and respond with John Doe's proper rank.

An even more efficient method would be to write a SQL query that automatically joined the ranks table to the members table every time you needed both a person's name and rank. But that would be a fairly advanced SQL query and I wouldn't know exactly how to do that for your specific case.

Hope this information was helpful in some way.

Chris

yep thanks a lot!