Thanks Lynn, I tried it again but unfortunately its still a no go. My blocks have started appearing under my forumhome for some reason so Im checking on that and wondering if it might be the course of the problem. I will post back here once I get that figured out and have tried creating the block again .

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/external/2013/11/1.png?1

I finally got this to appear but purely accidental. I tried reinstalling it again and still got the prior error so I was gonna uninstall it. I removed the plugin I had created and got side tracked removing the rest . When I looked at my forum home page I saw it there. So it ended up working without that plugin mentioned in the install. Could it be using another plugin that was already installed?

The plugin for this is only to cache the template. You really don't need the plugin in order for this to work at all, it is just good to cache your templates.

Lynne, Wouldn't it just be a simple code change if you wanted this to show only certain usergroups... thus turning it into say a STAFF ONLINE.

I know about the 'staff online' block but that doesn't work for me, I would love to give this one a try and just add a code change to show only specific usergroups 'online'

Sure. You could add a JOIN to the query to grab the users usergroup and then only output online users in a certain usergroup.