true and it was something i thought about although slughtly differently. In the end this was a lot quicker and combine with a 30 day expiry date script of pms send by admin (me) which have not been read it will quickly get rid of those ones you don't need there any more.

Also, how under your suggestion would you do it for more than one message? arn't you then going to need more than one column in the user profile field or in the end perhaps an extra table linking user with adminmessage - by the time you have done that you loose most of the gains you started with.