Yea it was what I was thinking of but I'm not too sure that is safe. To be honest with you I never had too much faith in designs that revolved around time. I mean they are cool and give your site some personality but to manipulate a DATABASE's style variables daily at a set time interval with live connections is asking for a forum boo boo. I'd say the cron script should first shut down the forum (or connections) before it changes the variables, although the best way to do this safely is by hand. I'd wait until they get the software wrinkles ironed out (not to mention learn A LOT more about databases) before fooling around with forum manipulating cron scripts. Ed would know a lot more about me, I'm just a php newbie!