resource id #4 Why am I getting this?

Question

I have a pretty basic forum template I am working on for testing purposes

When I create a topic, and press submit, the proccess updates the database but doesn\'t out

Answer 1

You are getting resource id #4 because $result is an resource,you must extract the values contained in it by this way,

$result=mysql_query($sql);
$values = mysql_fetch_array($result);
var_dump($values);

More about resource variable

Update 2(From OP comments)

You are printing values using field name,In that case you will have to change to

while($rows=mysql_fetch_array($result,MYSQL_ASSOC))

Or you can directly use mysql_fetch_assoc(),which in your case will be

while($rows=mysql_fetch_assoc($result)){
      echo $rows['id'];
}