VivahSangam

Every new user who registered disappeared. Not an error — silence. They could log in, but they'd never show up in search, browse, or anyone's match results.

The cause was one missing row. register.php created the account, but never created the matching stub row in user_profiles. Every browse, search, and match query joined the two tables with an INNER JOIN — which meant any user without a profile row was silently excluded from the result set entirely. No error thrown, nothing to log. The site just quietly stopped showing people who'd just joined it.

Switched the join type everywhere a newly registered user could be affected — profiles.php, the public profile viewer, and getRecommendedMatches() — plus a related issue where zero-score matches were being filtered out of recommendations instead of shown at the bottom.

-- Before: profile-less users vanish
SELECT u.*, p.* FROM users u
INNER JOIN user_profiles p ON u.id = p.user_id
WHERE u.status = 'active';

-- After: every user returned, profile fields fill in as completed
SELECT u.*, p.* FROM users u
LEFT JOIN user_profiles p ON u.id = p.user_id
WHERE u.status = 'active';

Root cause stayed in register.php too — it now creates the user_profiles stub at signup, so the gap can't reopen for the next user.

• Auth & recovery — forgot-password flow on random_bytes tokens, SHA-256 hashing, and bcrypt for storage.
• Matching — getRecommendedMatches(), a scored recommendation function rather than a static browse list.
• Growth surfaces — an email-capture waitlist and a pure-CSS scrolling testimonials strip, no JS dependency.
• Deployment — shipped to cPanel shared hosting (MilesWeb), with a config.example.php pattern so real credentials never touch the repo.