[Rik Brown]

Originally Posted by Marco van Herwaarden

[sql]AND post.title <> thread.title[/sql]
This is not really needed, as it would not change the result.

But why do you want to have all posts have the same title as the thread? Doesn't make much sense to me.

Because users leave messages like "Help" or "Does anyone else have this problem?" or "Newbie question" which aren't very useful to our users or the search engines and do not match up to the pagetext. So we tend to change those threads to titles that are more accurate and appropriate to the search engines such as:

2001 Toyota Camry - When to change the serpentine belt?
Making a Cross-Wind Landing at London Gatwick Airport
Bikes: Shimano derailleurs vs. Campy - Which are Best?

Some threads may already have tons of replies. We can just change the thread title (and even en masse via queries) and run the query above to update all those post titles. Like I said above, yesterday we fixed well over 100,000 changes that have accumulated over the years. And, our forums look much more better.

Regards. -- Rik

ps: I forgot to mention about the "AND post.title <> thread.title". I believe its quite necessary. Otherwise all posts (we have 1.2 million) would be updated each time the query is run and that would be a real drag on the server. Instead, with this limiting line of code it just updates those posts that do not match and thus limits the load on the server and the time to run the query.