So I in my infinite free time decided to practice PHP prog by making a
groups database, where members can join groups, etc, much like Google
groups

here is my dilemma: how to handle the associations between users and
groups

here is how I have it set up:

One table users one for groups

Groups table has a column (TEXT format) named members

in this members column there is a text file that contains all the
members that belong to that group, the members are separated by ";" for
parsing

so it looks like: "john;cat;mavis;adam;snoop
dogg;peter;kevin;steve;bob"

is there a way to remove one element from this array (list)? with a
mysql command?

let's say I want to remove "mavis"

how would I go about doing this?

I figured that if I used "UPDATE" then it will do a block update, this
could take long with thousands of members

I also figured that a cheat way to doing this, with using more
resources, would be to create a table for each group with each user
being a separate row.

with hundreds of groups, would this be possible?