Dateline and Flood Control

[inthezone]

I am making a section on my site that uses vBulletin's global.php for login, member permissions, etc. but has users post entries into a custom table located in the vB database. I am trying to figure out a way to implement flood control for this section, and was wondering how the dateline system works in vBulletin, as far as which MySQL function vB uses to get that number, how it is converted into time using PHP, and how it can be used for flood control.