To make things short: I'm writing an anonymous forum software with PHP. I just feel like using a database is overkill and restrains my amateur skills. Do you advise against using text files instead of database?
Thanks.
To make things short: Yes. Strong advise against text files.
A database has advantages like some sanitation (no breaking of delimiters, newlines etc.) and less danger of access conflicts when multiple instances try to read from the table - and different from a file-based approach, writing conflicts are constrained to the record in question only.
Recommendation: use database