You could only make a measurement like this on your own server, so many of us can't say. But there's no doubt any chatbox can be a server hog with a few people using it, so that's why we've always warned people on shared servers to configure it as a shout box instead. Or use a hosted chatbox.

Read your post earlier on fixing smilies, but they still seem to be broken. Any other ideas?

I'll send you a wee pm.

On how many users did you test it?

Using it as a shoutbox would even cost me more resources because everytime someone loads the homepage the chat loads with it.

What would you suggest for using a chatbox?

I doubt you'll find too many people in this thread using anything else. But as I recall there are a few hosted solutions out there - http://www.addonchat.com/ comes to mind.

I don't obsess about people loading forumhome once per visit to see my shout box. That's what a server is for. The important thing is to discourage them from hanging out in the box and worse - carrying on long conversations in it that would better be in a forum thread. More than one person has observed this behavior much to their disappointment.

How about updating the OP so we know what this update does? PLEASE....

WHAT HAS BEEN UPDATED?

Thank you.. I myself was thinking using IRC. But the security risks scares me..:(

How to limit the number of smilies for a message

Thank you Hippy I sent you a PM with the info.

An interesting question; perhaps should be a Feature Request. But I can't imagine how you could really limit such a thing because smileys are after all only text.

The real answer probably has to do with your forum's rules. Our rule against spam would cover this and after a warning most members would stop.