Creating A Simple PHP/MySQL Forum

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I can respect your decision to keep this tutorial short but ignoring basic security protocols is not the way to teach people. You never, under any circumstances, insert raw form-fed data into a database. Instead you should be sanitizing all form data before it makes it to the database.

There are a wide variety of options when it comes to sanitizing data. And it'll often times depend on the application at hand; that is, whether you just settle for escaping quotes or go with a more sturdy character white list.

For the sake of simplicity look into the mysql_real_escape_string function. It's the most basic way to prevent SQL injections and limit XSS vulnerability. And like I said: it's simple. Simple enough to be used in this tutorial.

Another amazing answer to another pointless tutorial.