Get users with followers, and without followers - mysql

Question

I have a really simple table - follow - in which I store followers.
user | following
-----------------
1 | 2
The above means user 1 is following user 2.
I want to display all users on the home page and order them buy who has the most followers, and then return the rest of the users who have no followers. The below query is working as far as displaying the users, but I can't figure out how to retrieve the users who do not have any followers. I've tried RIGHT JOIN users u ON f.following=u.id but that gives me weird results.
This query returns user 2 who has a follower, but doesn't return users 1 and 3, who do not have followers.
Edit: this query is also checking to see if the user is following back, which is why I'm joining using the ID of 1 as a test.
SELECT
u.id
,u.username
,u.avatar
,COUNT(1) AS followers
,ul.*
,fo.*
FROM follow f
LEFT JOIN users u ON f.following=u.id
LEFT JOIN follow fo ON fo.following=u.id AND fo.user=1
LEFT JOIN users_likes ul ON ul.likes=u.id AND ul.user=1
GROUP BY f.following
ORDER BY COUNT(1) DESC
SQL Fiddle: http://sqlfiddle.com/#!2/98f65/1

Answer 1

The problem with your query in the question is that you are left-joining to the follow table. That means that all rows in the follow table are included regardless of their connection to another table. What you want is to show all users, so that is the table that should be on the outer end of the join.
I also think you're trying to do too many things at once here, which is why you're having trouble figuring it out. You want to know who has followers and who doesn't, who's following back, order them, consider the users_likes and so on. I recommend taking a step back and breaking them down into individual queries, and then building those into one result set as needed.
To get the users and number of followers, you can outer join the users table with the follow table like this:
SELECT u.id, u.username, u.avatar, (IFNULL(COUNT(f.following), 0)) AS numFollowers
FROM users u
LEFT JOIN follow f ON f.following = u.id
GROUP BY u.id
ORDER BY numfollowers DESC;
IFNULL is used to check the cases when there are no followers, and no link is made in the outer join so a null value appears.
If you want to work in the users_likes table, you should add it in as another left join. The problem this causes, is that it will return null values for all columns if there are no likes. (Example, if I left join the users_likes table here, I will see null for users 1 and 3 because nobody 'likes' them.) To make the result set a little more understandable, I recommend you don't collect all rows of the users_likes table. Perhaps this query would make more sense:
SELECT u.id, u.username, u.avatar, (IFNULL(COUNT(f.following), 0)) AS numFollowers, ul.user AS likedByUser, ul.created_at
FROM users u
LEFT JOIN follow f ON f.following = u.id
LEFT JOIN users_likes ul ON ul.likes = u.id
GROUP BY u.id
ORDER BY numfollowers DESC;
As far as whether or not a user is following back, I think this would change a bit, as the above only shows the number of followers, and doesn't produce a row for each follower.
Let me know if you have any more questions, here is an SQL Fiddle for the above. I will leave it up to you for handling the null values that occur right now.

Answer 2

You can use an outer join (left or right) from Users to your current query in any number of ways. An easy example that should get you started. This isn't a clean-up up solution, just a dmeo of a way that will work.
SELECT a.*
,b.*
FROM users a
LEFT JOIN (
SELECT
u.id
,u.username
,u.avatar
,COUNT(1) AS followers
FROM follow f
LEFT JOIN users u ON f.following=u.id
LEFT JOIN follow fo ON fo.following=u.id AND fo.user=1
LEFT JOIN users_likes ul ON ul.likes=u.id AND ul.user=1
GROUP BY f.following
) b
ON a.id = b.id
ORDER BY followers DESC

Answer 3

You can do this:
SELECT * FROM (
SELECT u.id, u.username, u.avatar, COUNT(f.user) as followers
FROM users AS u
LEFT JOIN follow AS f ON u.id = f.following
GROUP BY u.id
) AS subselect ORDER BY subselect.followers DESC