[damule]

It is a way of doing it there may be a couple reasons it may not be commonly done

1 When an author crates a hack they try to keep installation as simple as possible, most of the people who make there’s hacks have a very limited understanding of VBB as a whole so it takes a lot of trial and error just to get their hack to work.

2 There is a big performance hit on the DB server.

When you do a SELECT on a table with 100 records, the server looks at 100 records. Now if you do a join with the same table with 100 records and another table with 10 records the DB server uses the data from record 1 on are small table and try’s to make a match with the records on the big table, so we’ve made the server look at 100 record so far and it does the same with the second record so we’re upto 200 records that we’ve made the server look at and now with the rest we come to a total of 1000 record views.

Hope that explains it, joins are never and easy subject.