What best practices can be implemented to efficiently determine the top users in a PHP forum script?

To efficiently determine the top users in a PHP forum script, one can implement a method that calculates the total number of posts or comments made by each user and then ranks them accordingly. This can be achieved by querying the database for user activity data and sorting the results based on the post/comment count.

// Connect to the database
$connection = new mysqli('localhost', 'username', 'password', 'database');

// Query to get user activity data
$query = "SELECT user_id, COUNT(*) AS post_count FROM posts GROUP BY user_id ORDER BY post_count DESC LIMIT 10";
$result = $connection->query($query);

// Display the top users
while ($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {
    echo "User ID: " . $row['user_id'] . " | Post Count: " . $row['post_count'] . "<br>";
}

// Close the database connection
$connection->close();