Logging

I am planning to write a hack for my vBulletin that will generate a log file of activity on the forums e.g. every time someone posts I single line will be written to a file with posters name, forum, time, thread etc, so I can then run anaysis on it.

What I would like to know is if anyone else has already done this, before I write it myself!

I would think that 'information' is already in the database.

You should probably only have to write something that simply queries the database for the info you want.

That way, you run the report only when you want it, you can control the parameters (dates, forums, etc). The great thing about having everything in MySQL is that it is all DATA, ready to run a report for analysis anytime you want.

Having a log file created would just be useless redundancy redundancy.

Hmm yes but there are certain environment variables such as browser type etc that I would like to capture that are not in the database!

Having thought about that further though. I wonder would there be difficulties using text files. It is fine when one user writes to the file, but what happens in PHP when a user attempts to open a file for writing when another user already has the file open??