How can PHP developers prevent overwriting existing responses when adding a new response to a topic?

To prevent overwriting existing responses when adding a new response to a topic, PHP developers can append the new response to the existing responses array instead of overwriting it. This can be achieved by retrieving the existing responses, adding the new response to the array, and then updating the responses in the database.

// Retrieve existing responses from the database
$existingResponses = getExistingResponses($topicId);

// Add the new response to the existing responses array
$existingResponses[] = $newResponse;

// Update the responses in the database
updateResponses($topicId, $existingResponses);