freddie: That's a good question. I didn't think of that one. I guess that would require modification of the above protocol and have the server "push" new messages out to registered clients. So there would be one PHP page that the client program would call to register it's IP address with the server. And everytime a new message is posted, the server attempts to connect to the client IP address that was registered and tell it new topics that was posted. The only downside to this would be that clients behind firewalls won't work since the server can't connect to clients behind the proxy.