[phantomDude]

I don't have any experience running a message board like punterslounge.com, so I don't know how easy it is to integrate the contents of posts into a database. I do however run a website that's in a similar vein to this (I mentioned it in my earlier post, apologies for breaking the house rules). In my experience, knocking up a web-page that consists of a few dropdown-menus, text-boxes, etc. that can be used as a front-end for a database is quite easy. Users could enter home/away teams in text boxes. You could even have a list of all teams in all leagues in the database that you use to populate a drop-down menu with. The advantage of this is that you could run queries across peoples systems. For example, you could say "Show me all the picks across all the systems where Man United are the home team". This wouldn't be possible if people entered teamnames into a text box (or into forum posts), because some people would use Man United, some would use Man Utd, some would use Man U, others Manchester United, you get my drift. The sniffy tool would see all these as being different teams.

It'd be similarly easy enough to write up a web-page where people could request information from the database. Same story as before, you'd have a page with drop-down menus, text boxes, etc. that people could use to fill in data, only this time instead of an SQL INSERT statement being generated from these values, a SELECT statement would be generated. You could implement this as a PHP script, which reads all the picks from the database that match the criteria specified, and keeps count of the profit/loss while it's reading in all the picks, and displays a final profit/loss figure.

You could also have a database table containing usernames/passwords. On the insert page you could have text fields for this, the php script could verify that there was a username with that password in the user database table. In this way, you could ensure that picks are associated with users in the database, and that users couldn't (unintentionally or maliciously) add picks to someone elses system.

The disadvantage of all this however is that it's not integrated into the punterslounge forum. Instead of users being able to enter picks by making posts like normal, they'd have to go to this web-page. Though when getting information on the performance of systems, if people didn't like the idea of using this web-page for whatever reason, someone could run a thread whereby they ran a query on the database to get the up-to-date performance of the systems, and post them there.

This mightn't be what you're looking for, but if it's a route that you decide to go down, I'll give you a hand getting it off the ground (if I can find the time!).