> Please forgive my attempt to help you based on a woefully insufficient
> description of your problem and situation. I will not make any attempt to do
> so again.
Actually it was not my problem, this is a thread started by some one
else. I use Gmail so I see the entire thread as a "conversation" and
the context is maintained. You should try it. Anyway, sorry that you
feel bad.
To others: thanks for your suggestions, but this issue is not one of
session IDs, nor is it solved by storing IP addresses separately
(which does not assume 1:1 correlation between user and IP). We'll let
that be.
Let's just say that in *many* online situations it is vital for
querying speed to have the same column that stores users -- both
registered and unregistered. A query in SQL that matches against an IP
address regexp to identify the unregistered ones may work for some
with smaller databases, which is great, and if it doesn't (the "~"
match is simply not practical for large busy websites), then consider
a small separate column that stores the registration status as a flag.
Thanks.