If it's not too much trouble, could we do the watchlist without string comparisons? I bet a table like this speed things up:

user_id article_id ------- ---------- 284 298 284 1598 284 6503 284 1364 284 3305

Then, we could link the tables, like:

SELECT * FROM cur, watch WHERE cur_id = watch_article_id AND watch_user_id = 284

(Again, I'm not sure of the syntax: I made up a non-existent table!)

Would this work? How hard would it be to implement? How much would it help?

Ed Poor