The webmaster backpack java applet only works with webchat servers. Actually, what you see on my forum is incredibly stripped down. I turned off most of the buttons to make it easy for first-time chatters.

Because of the complexity of installing some hacks (modifying 20-30 files), people have started to write smart installers to automate the process. If you look around, you'll see that more and more hacks come as "vbHacker installable". My IRCBrowse hack does not have an installer because you only modify one file to use it.

You know I have been doing PHP for about a month now, I just haven't gotten round to using MySQL much.

A query is how you get information FROM or write information TO the MySQL database your forum (or website) runs on. Queries can be incredibly complex, grabbing a ton of cross-linked information from various parts of the database and recombining it into a temporary array which is then merged with HTML to display a forum page or other such tasks.

The reason why we talk about queries is that each MySQL query, no matter how simple or complex, adds to the load your server uses. But in many cases you do not have a choice. Each PHP page needs to do MySQL queries to get the information necessary to display the forum home, or a forum thread list, or to do a search, or to handle attachments, etc.

If you want to know how many users registered on your forum today and a MySQL query has not already been done to grab this information and provide it to the PHP script that's running, you'll have to do a query for it.

You can imagine that if someone comes out with a hack that does 5-10 queries and someone else does the same hack but it only does 1 query or even piggybacks on queries ALREADY being done on the page, then we'll probably favor that version of the hack!

Take your time, there's no rush to learn this stuff. :)

// This is the key you send from mIRC and vBulletin to make sure this script is not
// called by outsiders

What key?

Make up a key number and put the same one in both places (mIRC and vBulletin), like 3049 or 2179.

My coding in mIRC is very limited, and I'm not familar with the functions used there unlike PHP, but if you could somehow use a function similar to serialize() and unserialize(), you could convert the long and lengthy strings into byte-stream representations.

Maybe there is a related function in the C language iRC uses that is similar to serialize?

Another possibility is to learn the protocols to do a POST method.

Hey feldon23, You ROCK!!! Great Hack :D

My server is running php 4.0.6, I could not get this hack to work until I changed $_GET to $HTTP_GET_VARS and $_SERVER to $HTTP_SERVER_VARS, all it kept saying was "Nothing to do."

Works like a charm now.

Sorry bout that. $_GET was added in 4.1. I will make it compatible with PHP3 & 4 in the next version.

Also going to try to allow for unlimited chatters.

I idle on about 15 channels across two servers, and the same channel that I wish to display exists on both servers. If someone joins or drops and such, it updates correctly; however after a few minutes it shows just my name. I assume this is displaying the channel from the other server of which I am the only one on it?

*(Edit added)
I plan on running it on a bot that is in about three channels on one server, just thought it would be nice if it worked otherwise, thanks.

Well no amount of huffing and puffing will make QUIT work on a specific channel. And specifying a channel won't help your situation.

At this time, my script does not work predictably if you are joined in the same chat channel name on multiple servers.

I'll look into what's involved in abstracting my script such that you can specify which chat server's channel to respond to. Am I right to assume that you would never be joined to 2 different servers on the SAME chat network, such as having 2 joins to EFNet?

You can tell what chat network each of your Server windows is connected to by typing //echo $network in each one and looking at the result.

If you want, I can look at supporting this for 1.1. Already for 1.1, I hope to have:
-unlimited chatters
-passing the topic
-support for PHP 3 + 4

I really don't want this script to get too complex.