[David Bott]

Hi All...I run AVS Forum and TiVo Community.

The Ticker was custom made for our sites because some other ticker that was posted that I had seen a while back had some issues and caused load issues on the database server. Not to mention it had some small issues.

You see, with the users that we have...say 1000 people were running the ticker that hit the database every 3 mins....Well you can see the major issue that it would cause. (Yes, we could easily have that many if not more using it.) The issue was, people really liked it so we needed to come up with something.

We thus worked on a PHP script that runs as a cron job every 5 mins. This script does the lookup for the 25 most recent posts and puts them to a text file. Thus every 5 min this text file is replaced.

We then made the HTML page that runs a java script that reads this data. Thus we have ONE database lookup every 5 mins and all the page reloads just hit the text file which is nothing for the server to send down.

We are also developing an installed EXE file that does the same read. The reason we are doing that is because we want something that will stay on-top on a desktop and a browser window does not do that. We hope to have this done my months end.

The other issue with the coding in the PHP database call is that we needed to hard code out forums we did not want shown. Thus is not just something you can plug in.

I give all the credit to one of my mods who did the development on this. We worked back an fourth on it and finely got it like you see it.

I will see what we can do maybe about posting it. BUT...You will need to go though it and make all the changes needed for YOUR site. On a large site, this is really the only way this will work without killing the database. Remember, you will need to make a number of mods for it to work including setting up a cron job.