Database Stuffs
 

I was trying to figure out how vBulletin made use of the 10-digit ints in LastActivity and LastVisit, and parsed them into real time and dates... Did they create some sort of special function to translate these when they were pulled from the database? I was looking at it so I could query it out on my main page and got a little confused here.

Also... what the heck is up with the "word" table? What is it for? Is it for searching/indexing or... how does that work?

1. Those timestamps are stored as an Unix date, this is the number of seconds since the start of the Unix age.

2. Yes, it simply holds each indexable word ever used.

If you want to convert the Unix timestamp to something you can understand, look at the date function.