Storing values in Post Meta vs new tables

Based on your comment:

when a user clicks to vote, i get the value of that post meta and check if the user id exists in that (using php explode and foreach). If it does not exist then i add the user id in it.

there’s no query involved there, so it’s perfectly fine to use post meta for that purpose.

A query would be something like “load all posts from database where user with ID n has voted”. That would be more difficult to achieve, as it’s a many-to-many relationship, which WordPress doesn’t do natively. Storing user IDs as serialized data (an array) is a PHP construct, MySQL doesn’t “understand” that data natively, so that would not be a good use of post meta.

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