there are other forums out there that don't use an SQL/mySQL back-end, but they are severely limited when it comes to long threads.
I know this because I currently own and run a non-SQL forum and am eagerly awaiting the release of 5.0 and the conversion routine so I can switch.
With a puzzles forum there is a good chance that some of your threads could become long. If you went with a flat text file storage method you would suffer from speed degradation. If your topics aren't going to get more than 100 posts or so this wouldn't be a problem, but it still wouldn't be as fast as this.
Just my opinion...
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