Another way? Sure. If each user has his own login, just use User::Utmp and steal your calculations (40 minutes?) from there. You could also try installing Zephyr which may manage the messaging system which you can then pipe to the web pages.

Of course, I suspect that every person is under one and the same "wwwuser" user, in which case, my above suggestions are worthless. Perlmonks.org has this functionality you are looking for and it may well be worth digging out of the everything engine. Another option would be to cook up something from scratch that would end up looking like the PM code anyway- something like: keep timestamp in DB along with username. Every five minutes or so, you could look through and grab the timestamps attached to users that are <40 minutes away from NOW.

I really hope you are not really running the whole site off of DBM files, since these don't scale well at all. You should seriously consider a real database like MySQL or something similar.

AgentM Systems nor Nasca Enterprises nor Bone::Easy nor Macperl is responsible for the comments made by AgentM. Remember, you can build any logical system with NOR.